Fixie flick 'Premium Rush' coming to UK Feb 2012

3rd Rock from the Sun actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt will star in Premium Rush, an action thriller set in New York City and featuring a storyline centred on a bicycle courier who picks up a package full of trouble.

According to Carlton Reid of UK trade site BikeBiz, Premium Rush is the first mainstream fixie film since Quicksilver in 1986, starring Kevin Bacon. It will be released in February 2012 in the UK, a month earlier in the United States.

According to the preview blurb, "Dodging speeding cars, crazed cabbies, open doors, and eight million cranky pedestrians is all in a day's work for Wilee (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the best of New York's agile and aggressive bicycle messengers. It takes a special breed to ride the fixie – super lightweight, single-gear bikes with no brakes and riders who are equal part skilled cyclists and suicidal nutcases who risk becoming a smear on the pavement every time they head into traffic."

Needless to say and bearing in mind how trailers so often poorly portray the actual contents of the films they promote, urban cyclists will have mixed feelings about the apparent glamourisation of city survival but we should wait for the whole film before getting too po-faced.

No doubt, anti-pavement-cycling and red-light-jumping activists will hold the film up as an advertisement for cyclists' appalling behaviour while conveniently ignoring the murderous drivers.

 ...and the Quicksilver trailer from 1986