If you've ever done corporate time working in an urban business environment, you're no doubt familiar with bicycle messengers — you know, those seemingly suicidal individuals who inhabit an insular world that balances no responsibility with major responsibility. Surely, their ability to dart through traffic with nerves of steel and a pouch full of contracts demands a movie they can call their own.
Apparently, the people at Columbia Pictures think so. How else to explain Premium Rush, the bike messenger thriller hitting theaters on January 13, 2012?
Directed by David Koepp and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Shannon and Dania Ramirez, Premium Rush is the story of a bike messenger (Gordon-Levitt) who gets tangled up with a dirty cop (Shannon). It seems the messenger has an envelope the cop really, really wants. So, rather than give the dirty cop the envelope and save his life, the bike messenger — true to form — does everything he can to get himself killed, such as not give the dirty cop the envelope and then dart in and out of traffic in a crazier-than-usual fashion.
I know what the more, ahem, mature readers are thinking: Isn't there already a bicycle messenger movie? Yes. Yes there is. In 1986, Kevin Bacon played a stock trader turned bike messenger in a terrible little flick called Quicksilver. This is not that movie.
In truth, Premium Rush is a thriller that utilizes that beloved plot device Alfred Hitchcock referred to as the MacGuffin. A MacGuffin is an object that sets the film's story into play and drives the actions of its characters. It doesn't really matter what the MacGuffin is — a formula, a weapon, the One Ring — all that matters is that someone has it and someone else really, really wants it.
By locating Premium Rush in the world of New York City bike messengers, Koepp (who co-wrote the flick with John Kamps) hopes he's found a setting that will allow him to tell his tale in an exciting, fast-paced manner, full of quick cuts, car wrecks and endless mazes of city blocks for his stunt bike riders to dart around in while the dirty cop tries to retrieve the MacGuffin. At least, that's what the trailer for Premium Rush seems to indicate. You decide whether Koepp has achieved his goal.
When I saw Drive last week, I rolled my eyes when the Premium Rush trailer began. Being a somewhat, ahem, mature movie fan, I thought, "Not another Quicksilver." By the end of the trailer, my eyes had stopped rolling, and I thought, "I don't know if it'll be any good, but it's definitely not Quicksilver." And for some movies, that could be considered fairly high praise.
If you've ever done corporate time working in an urban business environment, you're no doubt familiar with bicycle messengers — you know, those seemingly suicidal individuals who inhabit an insular world that balances no responsibility with major responsibility. Surely, their ability to dart through traffic with nerves of steel and a pouch full of contracts demands a movie they can call their own. 
My hetero man-crush on Jiggle practically assures that I will see this.
If nothing else all the riding stuff should look great on the big screen.