Push reminds a good deal of tv’s Heroes (2006-10) – at least, in the first season before the show nose-dived. Heroes features an ensemble cast each with different superpowers and traces their interweavings and conflicts as the various characters come together. Like Heroes, Push is a superhero story but one that strips out all comic-book elements such as capes and secret identities. What I enjoyed about Push was its conceptual joy – of it creating a set-up and then playing with the various combinations and permutations of powers. We get fascinating glimpses of the powers in action – the Division Sniffers turning up in Chris Evans’s apartment, having followed his trail from a toothbrush he touched as a kid, and then being able to read the entire history of a glass of water. Or the scene where Corey Stoll’s Agent is Pushed by Camilla Belle and told that Djimon Honsou killed his sister, something that is not immediately evident until the subsequent scene where Honsou is reminding Stoll that he does not even have a sister and Stoll is vehemently insisting otherwise, before Honsou Pushes back, telling him to put his gun in his mouth and that it is okay, the bullets have been removed, and then walks off as Stoll shoots himself in the background of the shot. When it comes to the point where Chris Evans hatches his plan to use all of the combinations of powers available to him – Shifters to create illusions of a false case, a Wiper to erase his own memory of having done this, and everybody following unplanned courses of action to foil the Watchers before opening their envelopes of instructions – the film becomes positively ingenious. There is another dazzling scene near the end where Camilla Belle suddenly reveals to Chris Evans that she Pushed him when they met, making him believe that they had a past relationship, when in fact she did not even know him before that moment. It is a scene that abruptly turns the entire film on its head, leaving us not knowing what is true.

Director Paul McGuigan made a point of shooting the film with a minimal amount of CGI, filming most of the effects sequences in camera. This immediately makes Push something different, where the action comes with a viscerality rather than a CGI-pumped up artificiality. There is a dazzling sequence where Chris Evans goes into confront Djimon Honsou and secretly floats two guns up around ceiling level to protect himself, only for Honsou’s guard (Neil Jackson) to turn the guns back on Evans and the two to charge throughout the restaurant shooting at one another with the levitated guns. Paul McGuigan shot the film in Hong Kong – his stated reason for doing so was in seeing present-day Hong Kong akin to the Casablanca of Casablanca (1942), as a location where characters can vanish into the margins of society. Cinematographer Peter Sova shoots the city with a tourist’s eye that looks fabulous on screen.

In the lead role, Push features Chris Evans – who previously went through superheroics (albeit of the costumed variety) as Johnny Storm in Fantastic Four (2005) and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) and subsequently as Captain America: The First Avenger (2011). Evans plays with a naturally handsome charisma that has leading man status and stardom written all over it. Paired alongside him is child actress Dakota Fanning, now aged 15, who plays with a sharp intelligence. The two have a relationship and rapport that works well on screen. Unlike Heroes, or a host of other superhero films, this is a work inhabited by characters of real-world complexities. On the other hand, as the sought-after girl, Camilla Belle seems characteristically neurotic and unhappy on screen.

Push comes from Scottish director Paul McGuigan who previously ventured onto the genre stage with his first film The Acid House (1998) and then subsequently went to work in the US mainstream with efforts such as Wicker Park (2004) and Lucky Number Slevin (2006). Screenwriter David Bourla has turned out a number of other science-fiction scripts, mostly for low-budget films such as Yesterday’s Target (1996), Doomsday Rock (1997), When Time Expires (1997) and Nostradamus (2000).