At first glance it is kind of hard to get a bead on Push. It's a strange film in which a group of teenagers, each with psychic powers of varying degrees, are stalked by mysterious government types with their own sinister agendas. But as it chugs along, it becomes more and more readily apparent that you've seen this before. While some of the themes may seem familiar from film's like Firestarter or television shows like Heroes, it is in fact the film Jumper with which it has the most in common. All of its strengths, but more importantly its chief flaw, all run parallel with last year's hit.

This modestly budgeted sci-fi thriller certainly puts its money in all the right places. The film is slick, the special effect sequences fascinating and original, and the cast filled with some talented, readily recognizable faces like Chris Evans, Dakota Fanning, Camilla Belle, and Djimon Hounsou. So what went wrong? Well, exactly like its spiritual sibling Jumper, the film was written not to be a single film, but rather the kick off to a series (most likely a trilogy). It's not that I'm against such things -- after all, I'd love to watch a series of films about strange mutant powers used by anti-heroes on the run. But when you write a film to be a part one, what you're doing is writing the first act of a very long film. You have to spend your time explaining the world, introducing scads of characters, and setting up a lot of drama that you have no intention of paying off. At least not in this film. And thus you are left with a film that simply comes to an abrupt end without any feeling of resolution.

This isn't so much a movie as it is a pilot episode, a hint at what could be explained later. Watching it I was certainly intrigued enough to watch another. But watching this left me unfulfilled, a little bored, and ultimately disappointed. Even though I was liking what I was watching, there was no real connection because the film was terrified of using any of its characters up. Making matters a tad bit more complicated, the dismal performance of Push at the box office almost seems to ensure that we won't see a sequel anytime soon. You never know, especially since the film's distributor, Summit Entertainment, is flush with funding from its titanic cash cow known as Twilight, but it doesn't look very likely.

The Blu-ray certainly looks great, the gritty, edgy cinematography looking nice on my HD projector, but sadly the disc only comes with two special features. The first is a series of four short deleted scenes, none of them anything to write home about -- simply trims of longer scenes and a little bit of a subplot involving one of the minions dispatched to retrieve our characters. The final feature is actually pretty cool; it's a 10-minute short subject interviewing both the director of the film and an ex-military expert on psychic phenomena and the government's testing on them. This was actually kind of fascinating stuff. While the subject was a hobby of mine in my youth and much of this was rudimentary stuff, it is an excellent primer for those who haven't ever looked into the scientific attempts to quantify the powers of the mind. But hearing a lot of this come out of someone with a direct history inside the government's programs, especially paired with the subject matter of the movie, made for intriguing viewing and a must-watch special feature.

Push is available now from Summit Entertainment.

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