Premium Rush (2012)

A 2012 action thriller about a bicycle messenger who picks up an envelope and spends ninety minutes being chased around Manhattan by a corrupt detective, Premium Rush is a film of narrow ambitions and admirable follow-through. David Koepp keeps the wheels turning, Michael Shannon sweats menace through a role that requires him to be a gambling addict with a badge, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, still visibly stitched from a real collision with a taxi, sells the physicality of a man who would rather ride than take the bar exam. The film has no thesis. It has a route. That is not a criticism. It is a description of the genre working as intended.

The cast is notably polyglot, with Dania Ramirez, Jamie Chung, Wolé Parks, Aasif Mandvi, and Henry O all given something to do, and the film never stops to congratulate itself for this. The Chinatown hawaladar, the smuggling operation, the ticket that must reach Sister Chen: these are plot machinery, not sociology. A capable woman nags the hero about growing up, and the villain is a crooked cop with a gambling debt, which means the story has a personal antagonist and no interest whatsoever in the systems that produced him. The bicycle is not a statement about cars, oil, or the climate. It is a vehicle, in both senses, and the film treats it as such.

What remains is craft. The chase choreography is clean, the geography legible, the Sudoku-based assassination in the final reel a small, absurd pleasure. There is no sermon here, no moment where the film turns to the audience and instructs. It wants to be a William Friedkin chase picture and it largely succeeds at being one. For a certain kind of viewer, this will read as a deficiency. For the rest of us, it is a relief. The envelope gets delivered. The credits roll. Nothing is explained to us along the way.