Off Centre | Change the world, you say? Anti-spying push just can’t hack it despite ‘Citizenfour’

A bunch of renegade Americans on the run from their own wicked government hole up in Hong Kong hoping to escape “political bullshit”. At the end, there’s a scene with a plane.

Yes, I have finally got round to watching Push, the 2009 Hollywood sci-fi thriller concerning citizens with special psychic powers whom shadowy security agents wish to control.

The critics – a tad harshly, I seem to think – decided Push was aimlessly convoluted, and worse, stupid. Critics are often grossly stupid themselves, it is true, but still it’s likely I would have kept it off my watch list if I hadn’t interviewed the director, Paul McGuigan, before its release.

In 2009 I had yet to set foot in Hong Kong. McGuigan (Lucky Number Slevin, Gangster No. 1) and I met in his (and my) native Scotland.

He invited me to hang out with him in Los Angeles and meet Bruce Willis and Mark Wahlberg. This never came to pass, but that is by the by. What I recall most clearly is that he said he had “shot the f*** out of Hong Kong” – and it’s certainly true.

His camera, fluid and rapacious, captures the city in all its grit, splendour and eye-searing colour. There is also a man who meets his end by being impaled on some bamboo scaffolding.

The other thing I remember is that, sci-fi fantasy or not, McGuigan was quite ready to believe the US government guilty of everything they are seen to be up to in his film: developing covert psychic capabilities based on Nazi research; conducting experiments that kill US citizens; advanced mind control; and so on.