Tales from the Cryptkeeper

The Messy Physics of Potential

I miss, sometimes, the ungainly teenage phase of superhero movies. That brief period before the Marvel machine standardized everything, when studios were still chucking odd, mid-budget science fiction at the wall and hoping a few strange pieces would stick. Paul McGuigan’s *Push* (2009) belongs squarely to that era. It doesn’t fully come together, but it falls apart in ways that feel sweaty, ambitious, and weirdly endearing.

Watching it now is like cracking open a time capsule. Chris Evans, two years before Captain America turned him into a symbol of upright heroism, plays Nick Gant as a washed-out American hiding in the humid, neon mess of Hong Kong. Nick is a "Mover," meaning he has telekinetic powers, but he mostly uses them for low-rent hustles and crooked dice games. McGuigan reportedly shot the movie guerrilla-style on real Hong Kong streets, cameras tucked away in vans, and that choice gives the whole thing a grimy physical presence. The concrete practically sweats.



The story itself is a knot of secret agencies, stolen experimental drugs, and psychic job titles that sound like someone capitalized a role-playing manual—Pushers, Watchers, Sniffers. It’s a lot to cram into two hours. *ScreenDaily* wasn’t wrong to call it an "engagingly photographed but dramatically inert" thriller. The script spends so much breath defining its own mythology that the characters often get stranded inside it. Still, I stayed with it because the action has heft. You can feel bodies and objects resisting each other.

The restaurant fight midway through is the best example. Instead of another sterile digital lightshow, McGuigan builds a telekinetic brawl out of weight and friction. Nick and an assassin fling heavy wooden tables, not glowing energy bolts. When guns enter the scene, no one even holds them. They hang and tremble in mid-air while two minds strain for control. There’s something delightfully awkward about those floating weapons wobbling between them. It makes an invisible power struggle feel visible and tense.



Evans is interesting here because he moves nothing like the square-jawed icon he would become. He slouches, avoids eye contact, and carries fatigue like a permanent layer on his skin. When violence arrives, he doesn’t meet it elegantly; he stumbles into it. Across from him is Dakota Fanning as Cassie, a 13-year-old clairvoyant who barges into his life. Fanning was in that awkward middle stretch between child-star precision and adult roles, and the performance holds both versions of her at once. She stomps around in combat boots and mini-skirts, drinks, acts exhausted by the world, and sometimes that tension works better than the script deserves. Whether it reads as miscasting or as a sharp portrait of forced adolescence probably depends on how much patience you have for teenage angst. I’m still undecided.

Djimon Hounsou, meanwhile, gets the rawest deal. As Carver—the agent who can "push" thoughts into other people’s minds—he brings the authority you’d expect from him, but the screenplay never finds a use for it. He’s left to stand there, mildly irritated and naturally imposing, without ever being given the scene that would justify everyone else’s fear.



By the end, *Push* tangles itself into knots. Nick and Cassie’s final scheme—memory wipes, planted envelopes, clairvoyants being tricked by their own foresight—gets so convoluted that the emotional stakes disappear into the logistics. It’s also obviously angling toward a franchise that never arrived, right down to that hopeful closing tease.

And yet I keep circling back to it. McGuigan’s vision of superpowers is grubby, local, and blessedly unheroic. *Push* is absolutely a flawed experiment, but there’s real charm in watching psychic lowlifes hustle for rent money in fish markets instead of saving the universe from another anonymous beam in the sky.