Push

One of my criteria for fantasy-scifi films is that if you're going to create a "world of whimsy," in which the rules of reality are suspended, you absolutely must spell out the alterations to reality so that we know what they are. You can't keep changing them in some open-ended fashion during the story.

One of the reasons I liked Push is that near the beginning of the movie, we get an inventory rundown of all the special powers that various "super" individuals have. Some can move objects, other can intrude into people's thoughts and memories, other can track people, still others can scream in a way that will burst your eardrums. We don't get to meet all these types of folks right away, but when we do, they seem familiar because of this brief courtesy rundown.

See how easy it is? You would think all movies would do such things, but a lesser film than this one would have forgone this preview and simply introduced the "super powers" on the fly. As a result, we would have been left in confusion about just how many superpowers are out in the wild.

Another way of stating this is that it is important to delimit the scope of the fantasy powers right away, so that we know what the boundaries are. With those in mind, we can build expectations of story, and of character behavior.

A glaring counterexample is the recent abysmal Mummy series (the ones staring Brendan Fraser) in which the powers of the Mummy just seem to keep growing, on and on, without end. Whatever the Mummy needs to be able to do, he does.

Push, which I saw in Leominster last Monday, got me interested in the characters, because it cared to limit what they could do, and to tell us what those limits were. Moreover, it wasn't all action and martial arts, as you might expect for a movie shot in Hong Kong. There is plenty of mental chessgame action between the good guys and the bad guys that culminates in an inspired caper-type Act Three that takes advantage of the superpowers of the good guys in just the right way.

One of my favorite plot premises is when one of the characters can't distinguish between reality and disreality, and must figure it out using some kind of insight or logic. The climax of Push provided a nice example of that, of characters screwing with each other's minds to confuse them of what is true, and what isn't. As the audience, we too are in the dark, but we are led into truth by the actions of one the characters, who must figure it all out in time.

In many ways, this movie seemed like an evolution of last year's Jumper, which is not awful but is nevertheless an inferior movie to Push. One similarity between the two movies is that having superpowers of some kind can be more a curse than a blessing, since it tends to bring you unwanted notice of the government, or some other evil organization, who is bent on using you for their own purposes. This is what we've come to in 2009: the Shadowy Establishment preys upon those with unique and special abilities. No one in power can be trusted. And by the way, they can track you down anywhere.

A well-balanced scifi thriller---I didn't even mind those damn screamers.