At least "Premium Rush" gets the "rush" part right.

If you’ve ever wondered if there was a way to make a bicycle chase exciting onscreen (and Lord knows I have…), then your wondering should be put to an end after seeing Premium Rush, as this movie finds a way to make at least three of them pretty darn effective.  While browsing the iTunes store last night on the Apple TV looking for something/anything that I might have missed in the theater earlier this year, I stumbled across this little action-thriller from writer/director David Koepp, the screenwriter of such flicks as Carlito’s Way, Mission: Impossible and the first Spider-Man movie, among others.

It stars Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, who has been one of my favorite actors of the last several years, starting when I saw him in the little-seen Brick several years ago (sorry for being behind the curve, folks, but I never watched “Third Rock from the Sun”), and his more recent roles in this year’s Looper and The Dark Knight Rises has kept me following his work with great interest.  In this flick, he’s Wiley, a former bicycle trick-rider who, after graduating law school, found the prospect of life stuck at a desk so unattractive that he didn’t bother taking the Bar exam and continued his student job as a bicycle courier.  He tells us early on that his bike doesn’t have brakes or gears because hesitating and stopping is always more dangerous than just going all-out, a philosophy that makes him a good courier, but also makes hanging on to his fellow-courier girlfriend pretty difficult.

Desperate for some extra work late one afternoon, Wiley accepts an envelope from his girlfriend’s roommate and is assigned the task of delivering it halfway across New York to an address in Chinatown within three hours.  Wiley doesn’t know he’s holding the claim-check for several thousand bucks in the hands of Chinese mobsters, but crooked cop Bobby Monday (Michael Shannon) sure does, and has every intention of getting his hands on that moolah.  Almost immediately, he’s accosted by Monday, who demands the envelope, but of course, Wiley isn’t about to compromise a job by failing to deliver to the proper recipient (or get pushed around by some “douchebag”), so the chase begins. 

We jump about via flashbacks to different points of the 8-hour day, seeing how all of the characters come to be at the points we find them in Wiley’s adventure.  Koepp’s mix-and-mash chronology is very interesting and does a fairly-good job of fleshing out the characters and their motivations without dragging the narrative to a stop.  The camera stays low to the ground, in a sort of riders’-eye view, showing us Wiley looking several blocks ahead and mentally mapping out how to avoid the perils of opening cab doors and lane-changing delivery trucks.  It seems that all those honking horns we hear whenever we see a movie or a TV show set in New York are ALL meant for bicycle couriers.  These guys might all have a death wish, weaving in and out of insane traffic, dodging pedestrians or piggybacking on school buses and other municipal vehicles when they need an extra mile-per-hour or two, but that very daredevil quality might just be what makes them sorta useful.  They’re paid for speedy delivery, after all.

Some of the other characters might not be as developed as much as you might like (a poor put-upon bicycle traffic cop factors into the story early on, but is sort of dumped from the plot unceremoniously near the end, and without much fanfare), but Michael Shannon deserves some extra mention in that regard.  His portrayal of Detective Monday is yet another entry on his list of roles that make good use of that natural creepiness that always seems to be right behind his eyes.  Monday is so sociopathic that it’s almost comical, and his simmering/steaming/bubbling-over whenever Wiley escapes his grasp gives the movie the combination of smirk and tension that a good action movie just has to have.

Good action movies should take you for a ride, so to speak, and this one does.  Sure, it’s pretty much a “formula” movie, but it’s a well-made one, and would definitely make a great mid-weeknight Netflix or iTunes rental.