Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a daring New York City bike courier known as Wilee sent to deliver an envelope to Chinatown. What he doesn't know is that a crooked cop and gambling addict (Michael Shannon) needs to pay a Chinatown gambling debt, so is given info that Wilee is delivering a bearer bond kind of ticket that will net the holder of the ticket a wad of cash.
Wilee also has to deal with typical 20-something stuff--a girlfriend and a romantic/professional rival.
Sequences show Wilee scoping out which of several routes would avoid wipeouts and searching maps on the internet to find the quickest way to his destination. Otherwise, the story is not overly concerned with character development. Shannon plays a pretty grotesque caricature of a crooked cop/addict and is quite over the top. The other main characters are quite stereotyped too--Chinese gamblers (wish the movies would stop treating Chinatown like it is some mysterious and exotic fantasyland), the braggart rival, even the girlfriend as a character is not distinctive. Gordon-Levitt's riding and stunts/stunt double is obviously the best; the other cyclers feel ordinary to me and not fast enough for the quickness needed in these biker characters.
Comic relief is provided somewhat by a bike cop who is constantly one-upped by Wilee's quick moves to avoid arrest for cutting through traffic with his risky cycling, as well as his fast thinking.
At the screening I attended, there seemed to be a real bike messenger group in attendance as well and they seemed to like the stunts and some of the dialogue (although they were making fun of some of it too). If it was a roomful of them it would have been a pretty interesting screening.
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