Premium Rush Reviews
Top Critic
An unpretentious throwback to the kind of action movie that had no need of superheroes, Premium Rush is hardly a classic but fun up to a point.
Premium Rush is that rare bird: a chase picture that's just a chase picture - and a dandy one.
The whole film sizzles with urban aggression.
Premium Rush isn't mindless mayhem, a thriller for teenage boys bursting with hormonal bloodlust. Koepp's film has a brain...
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
The movie speeds along crisply, providing just enough exposition to lend a few pounds of emotional weight without bogging down the breakneck pace.
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| Original Score: 3/4
I do have an abiding fondness for compact and coherent action movies, and this is surely one.
Throwing "premium" into the title may be overselling such a trifling entertainment. But for the cinematically discounted days of late summer, it's a perfectly diverting little ride.
It's a good thing that adrenaline tends to short-circuit logical thinking; the plot is mostly nonsensical, but you'll be too thrilled by the literal twists and turns to care much.
Premium Rush earns its place as end-of-the-summer escapism, but I can't say that it's more than a well-done formula flick.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
Undeniably, the word "action" does apply, but only as it falls between "class" and "suit."
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| Original Score: 2/4
"Premium Rush" is both the title of this movie and its clever if less than subtle promise to summer audiences -- which it mostly delivers ...
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
This is supposed to be a life-and-death chase movie, not two friends messing around.
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| Original Score: 1/4
Sit back and enjoy it as a summer jolt of pure adrenaline.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Like the lithe and maligned carriers weaving their way through Big Apple traffic, "Premium Rush" is a thin, brash, sinewy thing built entirely for speed.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The contrived tale is filled with plot holes, but the story takes a back seat to the chase-filled, daredevil action.
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| Original Score: 3/4
[It] actually doesn't sound like it would work at all as a tightly wound slice of street action, but it does, and in radically fresh ways.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Premium Rush can't decide if it's a serious, ticking-clock thriller or an antic, stunt-driven cartoon.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Cruising the streets of Manhattan, clocking in at a tight 90 minutes and set on a bike without brakes, this loose-limbed action-drama is a swift, sweaty ode to the city's subcultures and a punky descendant of '70s B-movies.
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| Original Score: 4/5
"Premium Rush" has a lot of energy - too much, it's kind of exhausting. It also has a lot of trickiness.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Stuffed with zingers and zippy stunts, it comes with pretty young things of all hues and hair types - few prettier than its lead, Joseph Gordon-Levitt - and start-to-finish clever special effects, none more clever or special than Michael Shannon.
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| Original Score: 4/5
The plot is as layered and complex as a TV ad for detergent.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
The skeleton of "Premium Rush" is as old as the movies: a chase. It's how the skeleton is fleshed out that makes the movie such loopy, crazed, dangerous fun.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
For those who found "Speed" too thoughtful, there's "Premium Rush," the new king of brainless chase flicks (at least until Razor scooters finances its first feature film).
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
Hollywood has been trying to pull off the bike messenger as action hero since 1986's Quicksilver with Kevin Bacon. You have to hand it to Premium Rush, which has the kinetic whoosh to keep you spinning.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
A snappy, fast-paced thriller that provides a genuine rush to close out the summer. Even if you prefer four wheels over two, you're in for a pulse-pounding time.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The cycling action is fun, and there's a lot of pop mythology about the tao of bike messengers, though the latter sounds as if it were written by someone who pays for rush service, not someone who provides it.
Premium Rush supplies just enough dramatic rationale to set a series of Manhattan bike chases in motion and then follows without pretending it cares much about anything beyond the adrenaline.
The lovably ridiculous bike-messenger thriller Premium Rush is a welcome throwback.
Silly stuff, but for an end-of-summer matinee you could do a whole lot worse - and, by this point of the summer, probably have.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It has a few marvelous tricks up its sleeve with extra doses of zoom-zoom.
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| Original Score: B
It's Shannon who doesn't just steal the film, he towers over it.
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| Original Score: 3/4
"Premium Rush" is great fun - nimble, quick, the thinking person's mindless entertainment.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
So appealing is Gordon-Levitt that, for great stretches of his new movie, I suspended my disapproval of his character and just went with the nonstop flow.
I'm very weary of routine chase movies. There's nothing routine about "Premium Rush."
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
