Push (2009 film)

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Push is a movie about Nick (Chris Evans), a man who lives in perpetual fear of the US version of Division, a worldwide agency of major governments whose goal is to train psychic soldiers. To aid this, Division injects psychics with a drug to boost their abilities. Only one person, Kira (Camilla Belle), has been able to survive this drug, and she quickly escapes after taking the drug. Nick meets Cassie (Dakota Fanning), a snarky 13-year old who can see the future. Together, they track down Kira and a stolen syringe which contains the serum with the hope that finding it will help them bring down Division.

The movie was poorly received at the box office and by critics, getting a paltry 23% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It made a little over $31 million, not counting overseas and DVD sales, so a sequel is unlikely given that it had an estimated budget of $38 million. There is a television series in development being written by David Hayter, but the lack of recent news means it has likely fallen into Development Hell.

For the 1996 novel of the same name that was made into the 2009 movie Precious, click here.

Tropes used in Push (2009 film) include:
  • Badass - 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. Nick also has his moments, though, and was giving Victor a run for his money near the end.
  • Bald of Evil - Carver, one of the Sniffs (Mac)
  • Blond Guys Are Evil - Victor
  • The Chessmaster - Both Cassie and the Pop 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 Gambit 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.
  • Click. "Hello." - Pop Girl clicks off the safety right behind Cassie near the end.
  • Competence Zone - Averted. The parents are all far more powerful and skilled at using their powers than the younger psychics.
  • 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.
    • Promotional images also seem to imply that a "push" involves telekinesis, when it actually revolves around implanting thoughts, movers being the ones capable of moving objects with their mind.
  • Deadly Upgrade - The serum has killed every test subject, save Kira.
  • Deadpan Snarker - Cassie is chock full of these, and Nick has his occasional moments.

Cassie: (having just drawn a picture of her, Nick, and her mother, all dead) You better do something quick, 'cause I'm getting sick of drawing dead bodies.

  • Death by Irony
  • Differently-Powered Individual - See the Psychic Powers entry, below
  • The Dragon - Victor to Carver, Pop Girl to her father.
  • Evil Brit - The mercenary Stitch
  • Evil Counterpart - Victor to Nick, Pop Girl to Cassie, and Carver to Kira.
  • Fainting Seer - Cassie and her evil watcher counterpart have occasional flutters.
  • Face Heel Turn: Kira is pushed into this towards the end of the film.
  • Gambit Roulette:
    • The entire movie was one gigantic one by Cassie's mother to get the serum into the hands of her daughter. Cassie jokes that her mom must've been planning this since before Cassie was born. Knowing that, she's probably right.
    • Nick's letters can be considered this, especially the one of he and Kira at Coney Island at the end. This is justified by them having dated for quite some time, and by having someone who can see the future on their side.
  • 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.
  • Improvised Weapon - A wet floor sign by Kira, chairs and bamboo shoots by Victor.
  • Inspired By - A mild case, as it turns out there actually was a government project for investigating psychics.
  • Instant Expert - Nick has been a Mover all his life, and he sucks at it at the beginning, barely able to roll some dice. Once it becomes plot important, he suddenly get great at it. It is implied, though, that he had a lot of raw talent, and he just needed more practice or motivation. He's usually surprised when he does something fairly powerful, and he almost always does so after seeing someone else do them (such as Victor and his bullet shields and telekinetic-enhanced punches). He's also consistently a lot better at the big, uncontrolled stuff (i.e., brute force) than he is at the little, fiddly (read: precision) things.
  • 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.
  • Laser-Guided Amnesia - Justified with the Wipers.
  • Magic Skirt - Cassie. Necessary, because the character's all of 13.
  • Manipulative Bastard - All Pushers. Especially Carver.
  • Man of Wealth and Taste - Carver.
  • Master of Illusion - Hook, one of Nick's friends.
  • Melee a Trois - Nick, Cassie and friends vs the Chinese Triad vs Division
  • 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.
  • Men Are the Expendable Gender: Despite the relatively high total bodycount, female character deaths number exactly zero. The two female villains are specifically scripted to not cross the Moral Event Horizon so the audience won't be upset. They merely get in the way of the heroes, never killing anyone. One pulls a gun and is about to fire but is stopped just in time to avoid facing Karma. Conversely, all the male villains, including mooks, die, regardless of how bad their actions are.
    • In a deleted scene Popgirl kills Stowe (the Stitch) for failing her
  • Mind Rape - Remember that time your best friend killed your brother? No? Well, you do now.
  • More Than Mind Control - Being Pushed is this, which explains how Nick fought off Carver's push to walk off the edge of the building.
  • Mutant Draft Board - present, but unclear. It's not made sure if Division just registers and tracks all psychics, or if it makes them actively work for Division, whether they want to or not.
  • Nightmare Fuel Coloring Book - Cassie's drawings of the future.
  • Not Even Bothering with the Accent: Neither Djimon Hounsou (from Benin) nor Cliff Curtis (from New Zealand) even bothers to try to sound like Americans. It could be that Division is an international organization (Carver does say near the end that he's working specifically for the US), or that the two were recruited from their respective countries to the US, but it's never specified.
  • One Person, One Power - strictly observed.
  • Psychic-Assisted Suicide - Pushers can make you eat your gun.
    • Carver to one of his men who had just failed him (he pushes him to think the gun's empty though).
    • During the final battle, Carver pushes two mooks to shoot each-other while Kira commands two under her control to walk off the edge of a building.
    • Kira to Carver at the end of the film. Yay karma!
  • Psychic Powers - The basis of all powers in Push:
    • Pushers are able to use Mind Control. Really, it's More Than Mind Control, since it works by implanting and/or overwriting memories.
    • Wipers are able to erase all or parts of a person's memory.
    • Movers are telekinetics.
    • 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 from how their ability works: literally by sniffing the object in a form of psychometry.
    • Watchers predict the future - or at least, the future that one intends to take. They can be countered by not knowing what you're going to do until right before you do it, and having your memories erased can stop them dead in their tracks.
    • Shadows can hide people by "shadowing" an object from them, allowing their subject to not be found. They are generally used to cancel out Sniffers. Extremely powerful ones can cancel out Watchers, though there's only one known occurrence of this.
    • From the comic series:
  • Scarily Competent Tracker - The Sniffs. They used a 10-year old toothbrush to find Nick.
  • Scary Black Man - Carver. He's played by Djimon Honsou, what do you expect?
  • Screw Gun Safety - Some would say that if you're a telekinetic who's not very good at it, you would take extra care to make sure that the pistols you are levitating are not pointed at you when you work the slide.
  • Scry vs. Scry - Cassie versus Pop Girl.
  • Sequel Hook - Nick and Cassie defeated the Pop Gang and the Division agents, and they have the drug and are going to use it to save Cassie's mom and take down Divison. How they are going to do that isn't really known yet.
  • Shoot the Dog: The Chinese Triad leader killing Victor before Nick has to.
  • 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.
  • Strong as They Need to Be - Nick starts off a relatively unskilled Mover; his encounters with the much-stronger and infinitely more Badass Victor seem to boost his competency via Awesomeness By Analysis to the point that in their final battle, he's enough of a match to overpower him to nearly beat him to death.
  • Super Human Trafficking
  • Super Serum - The MacGuffin of the plot; Division is testing it on psychics to enhance their powers. It's failed so far in every case, save one.
  • Xanatos Speed Chess - Once Nick and Cassie realize how they can shut down Pop Girl, things change very quickly, especially when the letters come into play.
  • 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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