Shannon, Levitt power ‘Rush’

By ROGER MOORE
McCLATCHY NEWS SERVICE

Michael Shannon plays a villain with “impulse-control issues” in the bike-courier thriller “Premium Rush.” Shannon fans will salivate at the thought of that. Nobody can turn on the “impulse-control” scary like Michael Shannon. That means his performance is as amped-up and flat out as the hell-bent-for-rubber young cyclists who hurtle through Manhattan’s crowded canyon-streets in this breathless chase picture.

“Over the top?” Dude was over the top the day he started rehearsals. By the time Shannon was on the set, he couldn’t SEE the top any more.

Shannon, an Oscar nominee for “Revolutionary Road,” a vision of madness on “Take Shelter,” goes crazy-eyed. He spits. He rants – about his various personal problems, about profanity in “family” viewing time on TV, and about and at this kid (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who won’t give up the package he has to take from WAY uptown to WAY down in Chinatown.

Levitt is Wilee, as in “Wile E. Coyote,” a veteran courier who narrates that “I can’t work in an office.” We later learn he went to law school. But where’s the rush in that? He’s flying through New York on a fixed-gear/no brakes bike that he has utterly mastered. He dodges taxis, flees traffic cops and anticipates which weave will take him onto the hood of a car, into a door that a taxi passenger has just opened or into a mother pushing a baby carriage.

Acclaimed screenwriter and sometimes writer-director David Koepp (“The Trigger Effect”) lets us see Wilee work that equation out, in slow-motion, like Robert Downey’s Sherlock Holmes.

Wiley loves “running reds, killing peds” (pedestrians). He adores the freedom of his $80-a-day (“if you’re lucky”) job. He’s warm for fellow courier Vanessa (Dania Ramirez), a poem in sweat and sinew. And he can’t stand the muscular Manny (Wole Parks, very funny), who rides a pricey road bike and refers to himself in the third person, except when he’s talking about his cyclist’s physique.

All is almost right with Wilee’s Manhattan-on-$1,200-2,000-a-month lifestyle until he takes that one envelope, handed to him by a panicked Chinese college student on the upper West Side. It’s 5:33. This MUST be delivered to Sister Chen in Chinatown by 7. And that is when Wilee runs afoul of a cop, Mr. Impulse Control Issues, who bellows “Delinquent scum” at one and all as he pursues this punk down the island of Manhattan.