dunsuls-1 Strange this film doesn't get more love.Maybe because I'm a city kid,worked on wall street and was a messenger in HS,and road a Bike A lot as a kid,I see more to this film than most.yeah the story is a little out there but most of the "characters"are fair enough stereotypes and it was released in 1986 and runs 105 minutes,right at the height or low,depending on your point of view,of the "bike messenger" craze that hit all the major urban locals in the country.Kevin Bacon starts a little slow but warms to the character,Jack Casey,soon enough and Laurence Fishburne has a small but very powerful presence in the film as a character named"voodoo".Paul Rodriguez is fun as well as a ,you guessed it,Mexican wants a better life type.Its not great cinema at all,but its very watchable and fits that period of time as well as most films of the day.You could do FAR worse.

tgreene_msp Battleship / Transformers ... Quicksilver / Flashdance ... No matter the decade, Hollywood always tries new ways on working ideas. In this case, the latter two have more in common than the former do to their origins. Contrary to the early review, this film starts off and runs through most of the film staying close to the bike messenger world of its namesake. From some of the opening scenes to the name of the messenger service nearly everyone in the film works for, the Quicksilver theme is present throughout as much as half of the film. While not the bike film of "American Flyers" or "Breaking Away", the film follows more in the footsteps of Flashdance in following Jack and a select few of the other messengers as they either rebound or shoot higher for a better life.

Jeremy McClain I usually don't let little things like geographic errors bug me, but the switching back and forth between New York and San Francisco gets to be too much. Some chase and race scenes have notable SF landmarks, like Coit Tower and a brief glimpse of the TransAmerica Pyramid, in the background. I guess they really wanted those hills. There was also the convenient "dead end" off the Embarcadero Freeway, used to get rid of Gypsy. (That freeway is no more. It was declared unsafe after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.) Jack gets a name sticker with "PSE" on it. PSE is the abbreviation for Pacific Stock Exchange (also now defunct) which was in San Francisco. The messengers hang out in Civic Center.Then there's the NYC aspects. One of the deliveries is to West 88th Street. The rough accents are all Brooklyn/Bronx. The tight traffic scenes are all Manhattan. The city buses are from NYC. SF just doesn't have that many yellow cabs on the streets.Does it really matter? Perhaps for people who aren't familiar with either city it's all background. But when the movie has very little going for it in the first place, the location flip flops are a huge distraction.

sol "Some Spoilers" Jack Casey, Kevin Bacon, is a successful stock trader at the San Francisco stock exchange. One day thinking that a certain stock will be heavily traded, and to the up side, Jack puts everything that he has on it including his parents life savings. The stock was traded heavily all right, heavily down. In one day Jack lost everything that he made in the last three years as a whiz kid in the stock market: $30,000,000.00 as well as his fathers and mothers life saving.Devastated over what he lost his father Mr. Casey, Gerald O'Loughin, in trying to comfort him, tells Jack to keep his chin up and says "We Casey's can take a punch". Later when Jack go outside to get a cab he sees that he left his wallet back in the house and when he quietly goes in to get it he sees his father sitting by the kitchen table with his head in his arms sobbing,that was the first time that Jack ever saw his father cry. Getting a job as a bike messenger at "Quicksilver Messenger Service" Jack starts from the bottom to work himself up. Working there Jack really starts to enjoy the job and the people that he's working with better then the stuff shirts that he used to work with at the stock exchange and develops a number of close friendships there: Hector, Paul Rodriguez, Voodoo, Laurence Fishburne, and Terri, Jami Gertz.Though the money that Jack makes as a messenger is minuscule to what he made in the stock market he really likes and is very happy with his job and his new found friends there at the messenger service. Like the saying goes :"Money can't buy you happiness". Jack's fellow bike messenger Hector wants to get a bank lone so he can open up a food stand business but the banks won't give him one because he doesn't any collateral to cover it. Knowing that Jack was a "Market Mavin" Hector entrusts him with what little money that he has to invest and make a profit with it. Jack hesitant at first, because of what happened to him in the market, then goes along with Hector's idea because Hector tells him that if he loses his money he wont hold it against him. It's that Jack's expertise is the only way that Hector can get the cash that he needs outside of going to the local Mexican loan-sharks who would break his head if he couldn't pay them back the money with interest that they loaned him. Jack's old touch in picking winners in the stock market comes back. Jack puts Hectors money in the stocks that he thinks that will click and they do and Jack rolls up more that what Hector would need in profits to open up the business that he was always dreaming about. Voodoo always seems to have far more money then any of the messengers make at the job because Voodoo works for Gypsy ,Rudy Ramos, delivering drugs for him while he doing his job at the messenger service. One day Voodoo tells Gypsy that he's had it with delivering his "goods" and wants out of the drug business and is going to stop working for him. A few days later when Jack and Voodoo engage in a bike race Gypsy, who was waiting to ambush him, saw his chance to keep Voodoo quiet about his drug dealing for good. It's then that Gypsy runs down Voodoo with his car and kills him on the deserted San Francisco waterfront to not only keep Voodoo from quiting but from letting out the story that Gypsy is using messengers to deal drugs.Terri is a very sweet but naive girl who Gypsy got to work delivering drugs for him after he paid her bill at a diner when she didn't have the money for her meal. Terri, like Voodoo, after realizing what she was doing and how dangerous it was, wanted out of Gypsy's drug dealing racket. Gypsy couldn't let Terri go because like Voodoo she was dangerous to him when he couldn't have any control of her and felt threatened by her quiting him. With Gyspy going all out to try to kidnapped or even kill to keep Terri quiet she runs to Jack's place to get away and hide from Gypsy. Jack having Terri safe in his apartment gets on his bike and goes outside to finish the race that he had with Voodoo that Gypsy so rudely interrupted earlier in the movie; but this time the ending to that race will be far more different.Nice little movie about someone going from riches to rags and back to riches again. The story may be a bit uneven but it's easy to overlook and enjoy the film. The "Quicksilver" musical score alone is well worth the price of admission or in this case the price of rental.