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Created Aug 25, 2012 01:18PM PST • Edited Mar 23, 2019 07:10PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Really Great 4.5

   Premium Rush deserves to be a huge hit. Aptly titled, it delivers as declared. A premium rush it is.
   Smart, sexy, thrilling, powerful, fresh and original, it’s an instant classic and a first rate crowd-pleaser.

   It’s also the best smartphone movie yet, even if the app-tivity mostly happens in nifty animated sequences between the surreally hyped-up action. How surreal is it? NFW is the proper reaction to many scenes. Occasionally NFW!!!

   Baba O’Riley’s synth opening opens David Koepp’s perfectly directed film. Choosing one of the Who’s signature rock intros? Bold choice, but an apt one, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s delivery rider getting his back into his living on New York’s teeming and unforgiving streets. “We fight for our meals!” Indeed.

   Some really great movies pretty much are just about being one hell of an exuberant movie. That’s Premium Rush. It seeks to thrill, with some laughs and charm tossed in along the way. It succeeds magnificently.

4. Acting

   Really Great 4.5

   Hot cast, starting with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Dania Ramirez’s super-hot biker couple.

   Joseph Gordon-Levitt matches rival Tom Hardy for surpassingly great physical performances in 2012. Bane the super-villain for Hardy, Wilee the super-rider for JGL, not to mention his proto-Robin in Dark Knight Rises. Oops, wasn’t supposed to mention that? Sorry.

   Anyway, great physical roles define great male moviestars like De Niro, Brando and Crowe. Hardy and Gordon-Levitt now belong to that fraternity: stars who are physical performers as much as verbal.

   Dania Ramirez is a hardbody with a hurt heart and a good head on her taut shoulders. No wonder JGL’s Wilee is crazy for her. Of course, he’s crazy in general, but not to be crazy for her.

   Jamie Chung – a California girl born of Korean parents – plays a Chinese gal with an immigrant accent. Apparently Hollywood is still up to its old tricks. That said, scrumptious Jamie deserves stardom – as a Californian of Korean parents.

   Michael Shannon is a hoot and a holler as a way-bad NYPD detective with a degenerate gambling problem. An outstanding bad guy who’s fun to root against, he’s one click this side of Nic Cage in Bad Lt. NO.

5. Male Stars Really Great 4.5

6. Female Stars Great 4.0

7. Female Costars Perfect 5.0

8. Male Costars Perfect 5.0

10. Film

    Really Great 4.5

    Big Apple film pantheon, make room for a new laureate. Hell, make room for a new champion. Arguably.

    Premium Rush delivers a tremendous cinematic experience even aside from its perfect sense-of-place.

    David Koepp’s film does a masterful job working backwards in time, using a digital clock as a title card. Put Premium Rush right up there with Memento as great films that progress from back to front.

    He also incorporates two terrific visual devices: Google Earth animations of routes through Manhattan and minds-eye views of accidents that would result from taking the wrong route through crowded intersections. The latter are sickly LOL. Wow.

11. Direction Perfect 5.0

    David Koepp made his name as a writer of big-budget action-adventure flicks, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, War of the Worlds, Spider-Man, Mission: Impossible & Jurassic Park included. Now he’s directed one and done a perfect job of it. Bravo.

12. Play Great 4.0

    Dialog that’s a bit precious keeps this film from perfection. Nothing for David Koepp and John Kamps to hang their heads about. Hell, their screenplay informs a tremendously well conceived film, fresh yet fundamental, and powerfully playful to boot. Koepp & Kamps are a duo to remember.

    Just when you think it’s nothing but fluff, it gut punches you with a heartrending story that feels ripped from today’s headlines. Wow. That marks a great screenplay, not a merely very good one.

13. Music Perfect 5.0

    The Who seemingly animate the entire film, first with Baba O’Riley and then with background music that’s clearly inspired by their Who’s Next phase.

14. Visuals Perfect 5.0

    JGL’s bicycled peregrinations around Manhattan are Google Earth displayed, bold colored lines coursing through a 3D model of Streets and Avenues, through the Park, around Midtown and on to the way Upper East Side. Fuhgeddaboutit!

15. Content

16. Edge

    Sordid 2.7

    Premium Rush becomes charmingly subversive when a multi-culti flash-mob bitch-slaps Michael Shannon’s bad detective. How bad is he? Bad as in crooked, crooked as in deep, deep as in real deep, real deep as in dead.

    Thus his tirades, epithets and threats are entertainingly nasty, even as they enthusiastically delve into the nether regions of racist and sexist imagery.

17. Sex Titillating 1.7

18. Violence Brutal 2.6

19. Rudeness Nasty 3.7

21. Reality

    Surreal 2.6

    Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s delivery rider routinely shoots through speeding Manhattan cross-traffic, occasionally even riding against one-way traffic. Sure.

    A word about his brake-less bike, a so-called fixie. He can and does brake, simply backpedaling the fixed-gear mechanism, often fishtailing to burn off more speed. It could work at the extreme level shown in the movie, if the world were surreal in terms of PhysioReality.

22. Circumstantial Surreal 2.8

23. Biological Surreal 2.5

24. Physical Surreal 2.5