Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

“Premium Rush” is a shallow chase movie that, for the most part, doesn’t ask us to make too much of it. Its plot concerns a New York bike messenger (the ubiquitous Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who is tasked with carrying a valuable MacGuffin; a crooked cop (the wonderfully weird-looking Michael Shannon) tries to stop him. Director David Koepp doesn’t have the poeticizing instincts of a Spielberg or a Peckinpah, nor does he have the talent for exaggeration that can make the action work of a Zemeckis or a Peter Jackson so pleasurably funny. But he has a feeling for space, movement, and pacing, and he gets the enervated, over-burdened aspects of Manhattan in a way that many filmmakers don’t (he doesn’t direct like a tourist). DP Mitchell Amundsen’s camera zips around the jumbled, cacophonous streets, always changing angles and levels, in an effort to bring us into the mindset of the messengers, whose kamikaze daring and live-for-the-moment ethos set them apart from the city’s more rooted rat racers. At select moments Koepp interrupts the flow of the movie to insert temporal switchbacks, Google Mappish representations of Manhattan’s layout, even slowed-down approximations of Gordon-Levitt’s split-second navigation decisions; this keeps us oriented both narratively and geographically, but it also mimics the heightened state of perception enabled and required by contemporary life. (In some ways, the movie’s bike messengers are proxies for today’s young people, who often seem most comfortable when darting through a Manhattan-like maze of mental-technological gewgawry.) As the principal messenger Gordon-Levitt is admirably sleek (he’s about as arrow-straight as Keanu’s buzzed gum chewer from “Speed”), but the picture really belongs to Shannon: his blundering, car-bound frustration in the face of urban chaos in general, and gnatty bikeriders in particular, will seem familiar to anyone who isn’t naturally attuned to the city’s pell mell rhythms. A couple of nitpicks: I wish Koepp had treated the romantic material with a bit more brass (Gordon-Levitt is too eager to win back his fickle girlfriend), and I wish he hadn’t leaned so hard on the MacGuffin’s back story, which involves the efforts of a Chinese immigrant to bring her too-adorable child to America. This tendency towards squishiness, however slight, takes something off the movie’s spin. It’s a spoonful of medicine after the sugar’s already gone down.