Push is a sci-fi adventure about an underground populated by an endless array of gifted psychics. There are Watchers (who can see snatches of the future), Pushers (who can influence others to do their bidding), Bleeders (whose high pitched scream can eventually kill) and Shifters (who can create illusions around objects). After watching the movie, which is a po-faced amalgam of X-Men, Heroes and Brian De Palma’s The Fury, you’d have to suspect it was written by a Paster (who clips together pre-existing titles into a slightly new narrative) and directed by a Decoy (whose overt style is used to paper over the cracks).
The best part is the key location: contemporary Hong Kong. The crowded city, where neon towers sit directly above ramshackle homes, feels like the right setting for a film about people who want to disappear. The overly complex mythology – derived from an original screenplay by David Bourla – has psychic experimentation beginning with the Nazis and never stopping. The U.S. government arm is simple called Division, and its forces are marshaled by Henry Carver (Djimon Hounsou), a Pusher who works within the system.
Division takes those it needs and keeps tabs on the rest, although the film has a habit of answering every plot point by introducing another psychic. It killed the father of Nick (Chris Evans), a Mover, while it holds the powerful Watcher mother of Cassie (Dakota Fanning), a teenager growing into her power. When a drug that makes the psychics even stronger is stolen from Division by Kira (Camilla Belle), a Pusher who has survived taking it where most die, she’s pursued to Hong Kong, also drawing Triad gangs staffed by Bleeders.
The fun should be in watching these various superpowers battle each other, but the picture has an oddly, and not altogether welcome, serious tone. Director Paul McGuigan has a history of being late to genres (2000’s Gangster No. 1 came at the end of the mockney crime wave, while 2006’s Lucky Number Slevin closed out the stylish gangster flick) and this time, to compensate, he ratchets up the mood and the visuals to the point of suffocation.
As Bryan Singer showed with the first two X-Men movies (Brett Ratner’s subsequent effort does not exist, okay?), the operatic comic book sensibility needs a certain levity to keep it upright. But McGuigan’s movie is either very serious or suddenly silly – the love scene between Evans and Belle takes the prize for perfunctory motivation – and the lack of a middle ground holds it back. It also has a problem with a pre-ordained ending that interrupts the narrative – characters repeatedly stop what they’re doing because it’s not what a Watcher previously saw. The story becomes like a video game waiting for the final level to offer resolution.
McGuigan is unsure how to use Fanning, a former child star in that tricky hinterland between her cinematic past and future. Her performance is a mess of attitude and scraps of cuteness (her underdressed wardrobe is also worrying), but the real setback is for Evans. He’s survived several despairing films in his career, most notably the Fantastic Four franchise, and he keeps suggesting that he could be a genuine American leading man, of which there are very few. He has a film star’s charisma but has yet to find a vehicle that fully showcases it. He needs to find a Reader, who can choose him a genuinely promising script.
