Push-Can’t Tell The Players Without a Scorecard

I expected Push to be a lot like Jumper, and there are a lot of similarities between the two films. Both feature good looking young people with amazing powers being chased by a bald black man. Both have exotic locations. Both make very little sense, but are still fun to watch.

In Jumper the whole world was the film’s setting, but in Push we spend the entire film in one of Hong Kong’s many fine ghettos. Though there is the occasional hint that they might be going somewhere else.

There was one scene that was reminiscent of the PreCogs in Minority Report seeing just far enough into the future to avoid capture, but not so far as to be really useful. There was also a bit of business very much like Paycheck. Well, if your gonna steal sci fi material, stealing from Philip K. Dick is not a bad place to go.

The main difference between Jumper and Push is that we only see Jumpers in Jumper, while we run into a seemingly endless assortment of ESP enhanced people in Push.

Of course, they don’t call it ESP, that’s so 1970. They are enhanced people or gifted people or something of that nature. There is a feeling of Heroes, The 4400, Jumper, and Sci Fi’s Sanctuary in this film about a group of special people that seems to include just about everyone living in Hong Kong. We are constantly introduced to new characters with new abilities, so that we end up with the Physic Super Friends by the time the movie reaches it’s enigmatic ending. The plot, such as it was, wandered around and around and never seems to go anywhere.

The cast was pretty good, with the best of the lot being Dakota Fanning. She sees the future and draws it out a la Heros in a little notebook she carries around. She has odd colored hair and wears a miniskirt and knee high boots.

Being set in Hong Kong, Push has a lot of scenes in fish markets, floating houses, and tall buildings. It is never made completely clear why anything happens or why everyone ended up in Hong Kong in the first place.

Push is one of the countless abilities which allows someone to alter memory and make people do things they don’t want to do. Other talents include the ability to heal, the power to move things, and the skill to sniff things and see the recent past of the objects. Another odd skill seems to be a group of people who have The Black Caranry’s sonic scream. There are more of these skills, but those are the high points.

Lots of stuff blows up or gets broken, lots of people die. Good guys and bad guys duke it out. And in the end, we are left waiting for the sequel to see how it all turn out.

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