I still stand by the assessment that I made before that this film looks suspiciously like NBC's Heroes. In any case, for those that stay true to the current unbridled mess that is Heroes, I've spent the cash for you so you can maintain your integrity and not pay for Push if you don't want to. Either unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your point of view, Push is generally better than what NBC is dishing up on Monday nights recently.
Let me get my final word on this Push/Heroes thing out of the way first. Do I think that there was some "borrowing" of intellectual property here? I can't deny that at least in concept, there are definitely some similarities that are hard to swallow as chance. As I stated in the previous article, I don't know who "borrowed" from who or what the intentions were, but it's definitely trying to create the same universe. To take it further, the plot of Push is pretty much directly the "plot" of the first half of season 3 of Heroes (which I'll get into in the rest of the review). In Push's defense, the execution, tone, and "genre" of this film is a different animal than Heroes. This is pretty much an action film with some paranormal dressings. So, no more tirades on intellectual thievery from me on this topic, though in fairness I may call upon Heroes later in the review for sheer comparison purposes.
I would also like to point out at that so far, Tim Kring and NBC don't seem to have any hard feelings here since Push is advertising in Heroes now and SURPRISE, there was an NBC ad with Heroes clips playing before the film started in the theater. I think that there is no question that Push was counting on pulling in fans of Heroes.
And now the feature presentation. Push is about Nick Gant, a somewhat hapless guy with underdeveloped telekinetic powers that gets embroiled in a plot by Division, an arm of the US government trying to use the segment of the population with special "abilities" as super-soldiers: yes, like in a quickly developed and forgotten subplot in season 3 of Heroes. Division has been developing a serum meant to enhance and amplify the "abilities" of these people that have them, not to be confused with the serum from Heroes that gives abilities to people without them.
Division has apparently been around since sometime after World War 2, but the destruction of the one and only seemingly viable version of this serum is apparently the one thing that will "bring Division down." Not sure the logic here because Division has been doing just fine without a viable version of this serum for years. Also, the focus of all this seems to be recovering the one syringe filled with this serum. It's a little strange that the guys that developed the serum would have no record of the formula used for it or any idea how to recreate it.
Division seems to work with a large base of "Seers," "Sniffers" and "Pushers." Seers are people that can see the future, Sniffers are people that have a highly developed sense of smell, and Pushers are people that have the uncanny ability to push thoughts into other people's heads.
So, in the midst of a lot of weirdness, illogic and craziness we get it into several action hijinx scenes, and the action isn't horrible. It's actually done fairly well. Probably the high points of the film are Dakota Fanning and Chris Evans who play the "heroes" of the story. They manage to produce a couple of rather entertaining performances in this hit and miss mishmash of a movie. They did manage to ground things just enough that the most outrageous of the logic problems of the plot really didn't start to hit home until it was almost over. Part of the problem our heroes have is that everything that they are going to do can be seen by Division's seers who always know the future. In order to subvert the seers ability to see their next move, they concoct a rather clever plot to outsmart them which is the crux of the final act of Push.
This leads to one of the big cop outs with Push. They utilize a cheesy way of ending several of the movies big action set pieces. You see, since Division's seers are so good at telling the future, whenever our main posse is cornered into a seemingly hopeless situation, Division simply lets them go because the "seers" didn't see our main characters dying in that manner and they are afraid of changing the future that they see coming out in their favor. So we have several scenes where everything is painted into corner with disappearing paint, so to speak. Cheap.
So what the hell is Push at it's heart? It's a one hour and 52-minute tease wrapped in an action film. The film actually has some fun in getting to where it's going. Unfortunately, where it goes is virtually nowhere. The movie doesn't end. Sometimes, when you walk out of a movie you say to yourself "man, they obviously set that up for a sequel." In the case of Push, you can't really say that because the movie doesn't end. It literally stops before the story is finished. It's not just set up for a sequel, it would require one to finish the story. The damned thing stops talking in mid-sentence. In my professional opinion, that's a cheap assed thing to do someone that paid full price admission for a ticket. The Empire Strikes Back had more story resolution than Push.
So, I have some logical beefs with Push along with the fact that it's a completely unresolved story. Yes, there is some minor resolution to the immediate danger the main characters are in as the credits roll, but they are still pretty much dead center in the middle of resolving the story as it's laid out. Hence, the whole movie comes off as a nearly 2-hour advertisement for the sequel that we will never see if this sucker bombs at the box office.
So what's my final judgment on this? The story has some plot holes that are pretty striking. The only real motivation for the main characters is kind of wrapped up in a plot that never gets resolved. The climax of the film really doesn't make a whole lot of sense, though it is done rather well from an action standpoint. There's a lot of shooting, screaming and running. The film's kind of a hot mess but not without some fun. Not sure I can recommend it much beyond that though. It's probably a nice Saturday Noon Afternoon Matinee diversion. I'd say save the cash you'd spend on a ticket for this and spend it on a large popcorn and drink at the premier of Watchmen next month.
It's actually a sad statement for Push that it was as much fun as it was for all the problems. It simply tells me that the script was a small amount of effort away from being a pretty damned solid film if they had just tried a bit harder. I didn't hate Push, but I did hate the sloppy story-telling and lack of an "end" to the story.
| Price : $57.99
