Push (2009)

Push arrives from 2009, a year in which a studio could still release a hyperkinetic science fiction thriller set in Hong Kong's psychic underworld and expect nobody to ask what it all meant. Paul McGuigan's film assembles a taxonomy of the gifted: Movers, Pushers, Watchers, Sniffers, Bleeders, Stitchers, Wipers, Shadows. Each gets a name, a demonstration, and a line of dialogue explaining it. The plot concerns a covert government agency, a stolen syringe, and a missing girl, and it moves through all three with the breathless indifference of a production that has read the manual and skipped the thesis.

The cultural ledger here is thin and mostly incidental. The cast is genuinely polyglot, with Djimon Hounsou, Ming-Na Wen, Cliff Curtis and Li Xiaolu populating the margins, though the film never pauses to remark on it. Dakota Fanning's Cassie is a capable thirteen-year-old Watcher with a deadpan delivery and a plan of her own, and Camilla Belle's Kira escapes a government facility through her own wits. Neither development is framed as an argument about anything. The villain is a secret agency running super-soldier experiments, which places the film's suspicion on state power, not on capital. The climax, meanwhile, belongs to Chris Evans and a man named Victor, as the genre demanded in that decade.

What the film does not do is instruct. There is no sermon, no moral appendix, no scene in which a character explains to the audience how they ought to feel. It explains the rules of telekinesis and then lets them collide. This is not restraint in any conscious sense. It is simply an older commercial grammar, and the picture wears it without embarrassment. We are left with a brisk, handsome, largely incoherent entertainment that asks nothing of us but attention, and does not always earn that either.