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Premium Rush
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Review written by and copyright: Ethan Stevenson (12th January 2013). |
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The Film
 Of all the movies I saw in 2012, and I saw A LOT, “Premium Rush” might have surprised me the most. Not that it was the best of the year—far from it—but it far exceeded the, admittedly low, expectations I had for it. Keep in mind, I thought “Premium Rush” was going to be atrocious, so, take any praise lightly. (I mean… it looked absolutely awful, didn’t it? Nothing in the trailers suggested this thing had even a remote possibility of being decent, let alone actually entertaining). And yet, director/writer David Koepp’s little bike-messenger-movie is not the atrocity I was expecting. It’s actually an incredibly entertaining (if sometimes still sordidly stupid) chase film. Sure, the plot is predicable, but it’s well paced, and the action scenes are exciting. The film also has a great villain, played perfectly by an even better actor. High art? Hardly. But, “Premium Rush” was one of the better (but definitely not best) straightforward action films to hit theaters last year, and proves a solid way to waste an hour and a half. According to director/writer David Koepp in the supplements on this disc, “Premium Rush” was born from his simple desire to make a so-called “map movie” set in New York City. More specifically, he wanted to use Manhattan as the stage on which his map-based action flick could unfold in real time. The film is essentially one long chase, or really an endless series of them, over-choreographed and edited at breakneck speed. The frenetic pacing keeps the film moving forward, and the action moving equally fast creates some sense of suspense and even danger, which keeps things exciting. Flashbacks and other narrative flourishes allow Koepp to hop through time to fill in the back-story of the characters. These little asides—moments where the chase is put on pause, and the screenplay lapses into a lull, with characters circling back to offer dense exposition at the cost of excitement—nearly kill the expert flow of the film. But the asides are a necessary evil, dispensing essential information. And Koepp keeps them as brief as possible. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Wilee—“Like the coyote?” a character asks at one point—a guy who dropped out of law school to ride a bicycle for a living. Why doesn’t really matter, although he claims it has to do with feeling free or something. Wilee fancies himself the fastest bicycle messenger in all of NYC, so when his boss asks him to make one last run—a premium rush-job, from the college clear across town—Wilee accepts the challenge, hoping to make a few extra bucks while maybe setting a personal record. But when the mysterious package handed offer to him starts attracting the attention of all sorts of unsavory types, including a dirty cop and some Chinatown gangsters, Wilee finds himself in the middle of something much bigger, and he’s left wondering what it is, exactly, he’s carrying. Michael Shannon plays the corrupt copper, an NYPD detective named Bobby Monday. Monday’s a sad-sack sucker, with a severe gambling problem and what his shrink calls impulse control issues. Deep in debt, Monday gets wind of Wilee’s cargo—supposedly $50,000 in an envelope—and sees it as a quick way to pay off what he owes. Only problem for Monday is Wilee won’t let the package go. Because the bike messenger takes himself, and his job, very seriously, and Wilee believes it’s his duty to deliver the package to its original destination no matter who—lawman or no—steps in his way. Again in the supplements Koepp talks about how he approached the project as through he was making a modern day western, and in the basest of terms there’s certainly a case to be made that he has. The bikes are like horses, and the bike messengers of NYC, like Wilee, a modern take on the rugged, rogue-ish, cowboy. Gordon-Levitt is good in the role, doing enough with Wilee to sell that sort of righteous loner “cowboy” type, who says to-hell with the law, and sees fit to fight for what’s right—in this case, the delivery of a package that literally could reunite a mother and her son. The character is mostly a mere sketch, and still Gordon-Levitt gives it his all. The always-affable actor does far more that most probably would, and even performed as much of his own stunt work as he feasibly could (the actor actually hurt himself bad enough during a botched take that he needed 16 stitches following a nasty crash into a cab’s rear window). But it’s Shannon, who does crazy like few others out there, that turns in one of his wackiest performances yet, playing one of the best baddies in a movie this year with his Bobby Monday. The movie works best when these two actors and their characters are playing their little cat-and-mouse game through the streets of New York, Wilee whizzing and whirring between cars, using his big law school brain to visualize safe passage (Koepp uses slick CG to stop time and show these little possible realities in Wilee’s minds-eye) with Monday scrambling to keep up. Technically, the stunt work, effects work, and camera work is excellent, and the overall energy in these scenes is palpable—the sort of edge-of-your-seat-excitement that’s undeniably suspenseful. The rest of the cast, and indeed the rest of the movie, isn’t quite up to snuff. And it's whenever Koepp and co-writer John Kamps take the focus off Wilee and Monday’s chase that things begin to slip off the chain. Dania Ramirez sleepwalks through the role of Wilee’s tough-as-nails bike messenger girlfriend who seems integrated into the plot simply because a leading man needs a love interest in mainstream Hollywood film, and not really for any other reason than that. Wolé Parks is similarly forgettable as Manny, a cliché cutout whose sole function in the story is to add additional conflict for Wilee that’s not necessary or at all interesting (they race through central park to see who’s faster; and a subplot that goes nowhere suggests that Manny might want to bed Wilee’s girl). And Jamie Chung, playing the important part of the worried woman who entrusted Wilee with her mysterious package, has one of the most unbelievably false accents I’ve ever heard, which is more of a dangerous distraction than anything else. It's particularly troubling because she features heavily in those exposition-loaded asides that popup with greater frequency in the weaker second half of the picture. In the end, “Premium Rush” is fast-paced, amusing, entertainment, but without question, Koepp’s latest is the least ambitious of the four feature-length films that Joseph Gordon-Levitt was involved with in 2012—the others being “The Dark Knight Rises”, “Looper” and “Lincoln”. But I’ll shamefully admit I liked “Premium Rush” more than one of those (feel free to guess which one). Sure, Koepp’s screenplay has more than a few groan-inducing bits of dialogue, and has moments of clichéd contrivance, and the characters have very little depth—even the well acted ones. But the chases—featuring trick rider Danny MacAskill and about a half dozen others in various places—are energetic and well worth the price of admission alone.
Video
“Premium Rush” was shot by Mitchell Amundsen, whose credits as a cinematographer—“Transformers” (2007), “Wanted” (2008), “G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra” (2009), among them—are dwarfed by his work in the Second Unit on big budget behemoths like “Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl” (2003), “The Bourne Supremacy” (2004), “The Island” (2005), both “M:I:III” (2006) and “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” (2011) and countless other action films. Koepp and Amundsen wanted to get viewers right into the action, shooting the film at a lower-than-normal position (at bike height) with wide-angle lenses, capturing the action with multiple cameras rolling at once. Cameramen followed the actors on motorcycles, the crew had use of a crane-fitted Porsche Cayenne, and they worked with a host of other setups too, sometimes even mounting a camera directly to an actor’s bike. The simultaneous shooting gave the filmmakers a lot of latitude in how the chase scenes came together in the editing room, and the way it was cut together creates an unmistakable energy. I wouldn’t normally say this—because I abhor the technology—but I’m actually a tad disappointed Koepp and the studio didn’t conceive of this as a 3D production, because even in two-dimensions the material is at times incredibly immersive and I imagine the effect could’ve even been more impressive in stereoscope. The Blu-ray, courtesy Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, has a striking and rock solid 1080p 24/fps high definition AVC MPEG-4 encoded presentation framed in 2.40:1 widescreen. As it should be, this recent release, new-to-disc, transfer is pristine. Sourced from a 4K digital intermediate, the results offer an image that is bight, sharp, brimming with impressive detail, and free of the more egregious anomalies—like edge enhancement, artifacts and print defects—seen in some films. Shot in the super35 format, “Rush” retains a light and generally unobtrusive layer of film grain. Overall clarity is excellent, with even the little intricacies of the production—from Gordon-Levitt’s stubble to the crosshatch pattern on his biking gloves—precisely rendered. The increased resolution makes the CG work more noticeable, but I’d hardly fault the transfer for that. However, intentional or not, blooming washes out exteriors and details get lost in a handful of scenes, and aliasing affects a wrought iron fence here, a subway vent there, and a few front grills on passing cars, so the presentation isn’t quite perfect. But it’s close.
Audio
“Premium Rush” has an English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix (48kHz/24-bit), which compliments the film rather nicely, putting the listener right in the middle of the action. Immersive would be the single best word to describe the lossless soundtrack. The film starts off with a song from the Who filling the soundscape, but it’s a little later, when Wilee gets out on the streets of NYC—particularly, picking up at about16 into the film, when he hops onto the other side of the road racing against honking cars and the like—that the mix really impresses. Dialogue remains clear and concise through all the action and aggressive, 360-degree effects panning. The track has little low-end bass to speak of, limited, really, to single scene—a flashback in a nightclub—but dynamics are otherwise excellent. This isn’t the best soundtrack you’ll ever hear, but its still very solid and quite effective at times. “Premium Rush” also includes an English Descriptive Video Service (DVS) 2.0 surround track and dubs in French DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, Portuguese DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, and Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1. Optional English, Chinese, French, Indonesian, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish subtitles are also included. Note: from about 40 minutes to 42:30, a large chunk of expository dialogue is spoken in Mandarin with default English subtitles encoded above the letterbox bars, positioned in the active image area. Strangely, two additional—if considerably shorter and arguably almost insignificant—scenes are in Mandarin without subtitles. Rather than an authoring error, I believe the second and third subtitle-less sequences are simply the result of an odd creative decision.
Extras
“Premium Rush” includes two featurettes, a half dozen bonus trailers, and an Ultraviolet digital copy. All video is encoded in high definition. “The Starting Line” (1080p variable AR, 9 minutes 30 seconds) is the first of the press-kit-y featurettes on the disc. Director/screenwriter David Koepp and co-writer John Kamps talk about the genesis of the project, from the screenplay to the casting. Actors Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Shannon, Dania Ramirez and Wolé Parks discuss their characters, and the training for and shooting of the bike-bound action scenes. Trainer Nate Loyal and Wilee-double Austin Horse talk a bit about the stunts. The piece stitched together with film clips, canned interviews and behind the scenes clips, and is generally well produced but doesn’t go beyond the trappings of the EPK format. Executive producer Mari-Jo Winkler and stunt coordinator Steven Pope join Koepp, Gordon-Levitt and the other members of the cast and crew for “Behind the Wheels” (1080p variable AR, 12 minutes 50 seconds). This second slightly longer featurette is all about the action and stunt-work. There’s talk of integrating the action into the story, the types of chases and how they were conceived and shot, the different Wilee’s—and at what point Gordon-Levitt deferred to his various doubles (which included trials cyclist and trick rider Danny MacAskill)—and how CGI was used in some of the more elaborated set pieces. Pre-menu and bonus trailers (180p): - "Sony Entertainment Network promo" (48 seconds). - "Ultraviolet Digital Copy" promo (variable AR, 1 minute 42 seconds). - “Looper” (2.40:1 widescreen, 2 minutes 37 seconds) on Blu-ray and DVD. - “Total Recall” (2.40:1 widescreen, 2 minutes 36 seconds) on Blu-ray and DVD. - “Universal Solider: Day of Reckoning” (2.35:1 widescreen, 1 minute 31 seconds) on Blu-ray and DVD. - “Seven Psychopaths” (2.40:1 widescreen, 2 minutes 28 seconds).
Packaging
Columbia and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment present “Premium Rush” on Blu-ray as a simple, single disc, release. The region-free BD-50 is housed in a Vortex eco-case. An access code for an Ultraviolet digital copy has also been included in the package.
Overall
“Premium Rush” isn’t anything other than disposable entertainment. But entertaining it is—unbelievably—and director/writer David Koepp crafts a frenetic and fast-paced action film, although the second half isn’t as solid as the first and some of the cheeseball dialogue is groan inducing. The supporting cast is less than stellar, but a jolly Joseph Gordon-Levitt does what he can with his character, and Michael Shannon is delightfully deranged as detective Bobby Monday. The Blu-ray has great video, very good audio, but is light on extras. Overall, I’d say “Premium Rush” is worth a look.
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