PUSH Blu-ray review
Things start to look up a bit here. Director Paul McGuigan shot the film entirely on location in China, and it proves to be an inspired move. With hardly a green screen in sight, the grit and beauty of the streets of Hong Kong really shine through as we’re treated to a rich mix of slick, shiny, ‘CSI-Miami’ style vibrant colours and harsh, grainy film-stock realism. These two styles play off well against each other as McGuigan switches between them throughout but, predictably for Blu-ray, it’s the former that works best. The final action sequence stands out for me, with clever use of exploding clouds of coloured powder really adding something original and fun to the mix (01:35:28).
Special effects-wise, it all works, it all fits together and it does the trick nicely, without ever really threatening to blow your johnson off, but to be honest you don’t really need it when you’ve got Hong Kong portrayed in such a refreshingly un-kung-fu-movie-ish way.
VIBRATION:
Sadly, upon looking at Push’s vibrations, we once again find ourselves wandering mapless down Mediocre Street. The soundtrack is inoffensive, featuring such purveyors of predictably gritty rock-pop as The Kills and UNKLE. It fits; it’s what you’d expect. The original score by Neil Davidge does its job and compliments the film without distracting, but that’s it. Push’s sound design, from the quietest dialogue to the loudest explosion, works absolutely fine. Fine. Beige. True, there’s a few nice touches here and there, such as those aforementioned screaming Pop brothers, but it’s symptomatic of a film that’s tried and failed to do something fresh and new that its soundtrack should give off a phoned-in, copied from a dozen other pictures-type whiff.
Lacking, just like the movie on the disc.
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