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Push is a movie about Nick, a man who lives in perpetual fear of Division, an US Government agency whose goal is to train psychic soldiers. To aid this, Division injects psychics with a drug to boost their abilities. Only one person, Kira, has been able to survive this drug, and quickly escapes after taking the drug. Nick meets Cassie, a snarky 13-year old who can see the future. Together, they track down Kira, a syringe of the drug Kira stole, all to try and bring down Division.
For the 1996 novel of the same name that was made into a somewhat different 2009 movie, click here. Also, there is a television series in development, date unspecified.
This movie provides examples of:
- Bad Ass - The fact is, Victor was simply destroying everything, and if the Divison already has him on their team it does not look like they even need the drug. Of course, if they made him even more super...well, then it just stops being fair.
- Little Miss Badass - Cassie, with equal emphasis on "Badass" and "Lolita", considering her taste in clothing.
- The Chessmaster - Both Cassie and the Lolipop Girl are constantly trying to prove that they're the best chessmaster in the film. Little do they know that they're really just fighting for second place. The real chessmaster is Cassie's mom. See Xanatos Roulette below.
- Possibly Nick as well, as he was the one who came up with the idea of using notes and mind-wipes. He also wrote all the notes, not showing them to anyone until the right time.
- Covers Always Lie: You see the poster on this page? Where Nick telekinetically sweeps through a whole street, throwing cars and such? Yeah, that never happens. Not even close.
- Crowning Moment Of Awesome - several
- A telekinetic "Mover" holds at bay a squad of at least thirty or forty men armed with assault rifles, and kills them all without breaking a sweat.
- Another telekinetic gun battle, where nobody actually physically touches the guns.
- Crowning Moment Of Funny - Near the end Nick injects himself with a syringe that everyone believes has the super serum and fakes his death. After Cassie finds him, he asks what was actually in the syringe. It was soy sauce. Everyone was chasing a syringe of soy sauce.
- The soy sauce may be a reference to John Dies At The End.
- Let's also not overlook when Cassie, a 13-year-old girl, attempts to improve her psychic visions by getting hammered on cheap whiskey. Dakota Fanning stumbling around like a wino got big laughs in a mostly grim movie.
- Deadly Upgrade - the drug.
- Death By Irony
- Evil Counterpart - Victor to Nick, and the Triad Watcher to Cassie.
- Fainting Seer - Cassie and her evil watcher counterpart.
- Fetish Fuel / Gorn - Nick spends half of his screen time on his back writhing in pain. Someone is getting off on it, especially considering that this is Chris Evans we're talking about.
- Slightly dodgy case with Cassie given her short skirts and sitting habits, don't say you didn't notice.
- Fridge Logic - Is Division many groups from different countries or one group from one country? If it's the latter where did all the other Divisions go?
- Why didn't Division just mind control the subjects before putting the Super Serum in them, or at least put a small-to-medium group of guards in the room? Besides the fact that such obvious safeties would prevent the plot from happening entirely.
- Golden Thigh Ratio - Part of Cassie's look as a Little Miss Badass.
- Guns Akimbo - A favorite technique of the good guys, not that they ever get to use them.
- Healing Hands - It's here, but it's VERY painful, and can work in reverse.
- Hoist By His Own Petard - Carver is killed in exactly the same way that he killed a character earlier in the movie.
- Instant Expert - Nick has been a Mover all his life. And he sucks at it. But once it becomes plot important he be good, he can suddenly do uber moves.
- It's implied that has a lot of raw talent and just needed more practice and/or motivation.
- It is shown that he is surprised when he instinctively creates a bullet shield. Same when he starts punching Victor, augmenting his strength with telekinesis.
- Also, he doesn't do either of these things until after he sees Victor do them. He may never have been exposed to advanced mover tricks before.
- Karmic Death - Nick stays his hand and doesn't kill Victor, who is killed anyway three seconds later by a Bleeder.
- Averted when Kira kills Carver in a fairly sadistic way.
- Kira kills him the same way he kills a Sniffer earlier.
- But more so: Carver convinces the sniffer that his gun is unloaded, then persuades him to put it in his mouth and pull the trigger. Kira simply orders Carver to commit suicide.
- Laser Guided Amnesia - Justified with the Wipers.
- Make Me Wanna Shout - The Bleeders
- Magic Skirt - Cassie. Necessary, because she's all of 13.
- Master Of Illusion - Hook, one of Nick's friends.
- Memory Gambit- Tack on some Omniscient Morality License and you essentially have a non-traceable future, since watchers work off of everyone's hypothetical plans.
- Mighty Whitey - Sure are a lot of white guys in Hong Kong. Makes you wonder why they bothered to set the film there in the first place.
- Truth In Television.
- Hong Kong was chosen because of how crowded it is, thus allowing the American characters - who are hiding from the Division - to get lost in the jumble.
- Mind Rape - And how.
- More Than Mind Control - the Pushers
- Mutant Draft Board - The basis of the story.
- Narm - The Bleeders just plain looked silly when they screamed, except the one at the end, who was much more powerful than his two sons who had just been killed.
- Sequel Hook: Several plot points were left unresolved.
- Psychic Powers - many.
- Pushers are able to use Mind Control. Really, it's More Than Mind Control, since it works by implanting and overwriting memories.
- Wipers are able to erase certain parts of a person's memory.
- Movers are telekinetic.
- Shifters are Masters Of Illusion, allowing them to morph any object of their choice, though it seems the object does have to be of the same relative size of the object it's being shifted to, and it's temporary.
- Bleeders Make Me Wanna Shout.
- Stitchers have Healing Hands, albeit very painful, and capable of working in reverse.
- Sniffers can see where any object has every been and who's used it. They get their name as their ability works literally by sniffing the object, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
- Might be justified in that the olfactory bulb is part of the brain's limbic sytem, an area that's closely related to memory. Sniffers "remember" what the object has gone through.
- Watchers predict the future.
- Shadows can cancel out Sniffers. Extremely powerful ones can cancel out Watchers.
- Basically, they put a "shadow" over something or someone so that it can't be detected by the "powers" that others have.
- Scarily Competent Tracker - The Sniffs. They used a 10-year old toothbrush to find Nick.
- Scry Vs Scry
- Shout Out - Mind control being described as "pushing" someone was first used in Stephen King's Firestarter, although as the power works here it's more evocative of a drug dealer "pushing".
- Slo Mo - A dramatic walk down a hallway. Verges on Narm.
- Super Serum
- The Dragon - Victor
- They Copied It So It Sucks - often criticized for being a rip off of X-Men or Heroes. The only similarity it has to either of them is Psychic Powers, which was around long before both.
- The marble scene in the beginning is taken almost directly from a part in Ted Dekker's book Blink, a book where the main character can see potential futures. When he's about to be arrested, he rolls a rubber ball down the hall, timing it so that it will bounce off the right walls, causing a distraction so he and his Love Interest can get away. Could have been a Shout Out though.
- Xanatos Roulette - The ending only makes sense if you accept that Nick knew exactly what lie Carver would tell Kira before he set her up to be brainwashed, but one could argue that Cassie helped him.
- The entire movie was one gargantuan Xanatos Roulette, set up more than 15 years in advance. Hell, it's very nearly a literal roulette, considering how one escape hinges on the roll of a marble...
- Not really a gamble when you consider that the person dropping the marble set up an operation in order to ensure that the super-serum would fall into the hands of her daughter who had not even been conceived yet. Nick asks how, if she is such a great Watcher, Cassie's mother got captured by Division. Probably so she could drop that marble.
- It didn't have to be a specifically Coney Island, he could have just fished out a picture of them together, and gave it to her because he figured that memories of him would be the first to go...
- Again, they had a girl who could see the future, one of the things mentioned specifically as possibly justifying a Xanatos Roulette.
- Xanatos Speed Chess - after the envelopes enter the plot, everything gets confusing.
- You Have Failed Me - Carver "pushes" one of his agents to shoot himself for letting Kira escape and killing his partner (Kira's "push"). Carver was willing to let it slide until the agent started claiming that there is no way he can be "pushed" again.
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