Director Paul McGuigan’s Push could serve as a primer for how an intriguing premise can quickly turn into one of the more uninteresting and convoluted blends of sci-fi thriller and paranoia of government control films. Setting the narrative in present day Hong Kong, McGuigan and screenwriter David Bourla pack the script with all sort of vapid details about a group of young people with telekinetic and clairvoyant powers, who are the subject of medical experiments for psychic warfare by nasty government officials from an agency called The Division.

We are quickly told that such experiments began in Nazi Germany and from recent research, the now second generation of telekinetic people are categorized by their special functions: the watchers, the movers, the pushers, shadows and sniffers.

While the cast is lead by attractive young stars like the interesting Dakota Fanning, Fantastic Four’s Chris Evans, Camilla Belle and Dimon Hounsou, no amount of sympathy is written for these characters’ dilemmas, much of which concerns the attempt to retrieve a suitcase that contains a vial of an experimental drug meant for the clairvoyants. With stereotypical villains and a mob of Chinese mafia, the characters are worthy of bad clichés on the sci-fi channel serials.

Instead we are treated to a few wildly implausible fight sequences, an array of wild visual effects and aerial shots of downtown Hong Kong, which are meant to evoke images of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and all simply mask a plot that becomes completely ridiculous all aiming toward a resolution that could have been more effectively achieved much earlier.