Wow! Such a good movie.

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Quicksilver has Jack Casey (Kevin Bacon) playing a hotshot mid 1980s stockbroker in New York. We see Jack getting a cab driver to race with a bike courier at the start of the film.However Casey bets wrong in the stock exchange and loses a lot of money and is all washed up. He has lost his parents money but instead of getting off the floor and fight back which was his father's advice he emerges as a bicycle messenger in San Francisco. Well those hills looked like the streets of San Francisco.However this bicycle courier firms seems to be made up of a bunch of losers and assorted waifs and strays such as new girl Terri (Jami Gertz) who incidentally all seem to have come from New York.One of them Voodoo (Larry Fishburne) is mixed up with a sleazy drug dealer for easy money but ends up getting killed by him which Jack has witnessed. Jack becomes fond of Terri but she is also now doing errands for the same drug dealer. Jack also wants to help out another courier to open his own hot dog stand and in order for him to do this he returns to investing in the stock exchange but the stock exchange he worked at seems to have been in San Francisco all along as were his parents.That is about it plot-wise. Jack trying to find redemption while also taking out with the drug dealer who has been stalking him. Going to the police never entered his mind. Then again in all the pursuits on the streets we never see the police in this movie. To keep the film moving along we have various bicycle stunt scenes and chase scenes set to 1980s rock music so the film looks like a part rock video.The more recent movie Premium Rush made a better fist of this kind of film. Quicksilver went into obscurity because it was badly written. Kevin Bacon was reportedly unhappy with the finished film. Its geographical setting is awkward. Is it set in New York, LA or San Francisco?The story is choppy. Characters such as Jack's parents flit in and out after long gaps. We get to know very little of the other characters in the courier firm, even Fishburne is wasted. The drug dealer subplot comes across as terrible and the romance subplot looks awkward.Still the 1980s 'greed is good' setting and Giorgio Moroder tinny electro-pop gives it some nostalgia.

The "Premium Rush" of the 1980's is a source of good entertainment, raises some relevant questions, but it never achieves the magnitude of being too memorable or spectacularly interesting as the 2012 movie was. "Quicksilver" aims at many different directions - social drama, romantic story and some thrills in between - but it isn't fulfilling in any of those, just halfway there while "Premium Rush" which could also be all of those (and incredibly more relevant after 2008's economical crisis), deliver in all those aspects but no, instead is a helluva of entertainment flick which is so much fun to see and tolerate rather than the depressive overtones carried by the picture made during the Reaganomics.In it, Kevin Bacon plays a successful trader who after losing everything on a bad business (never quite explained what really happened) joins a team of bike messengers, gladly working with them, gaining very little but finding true joy. It all happens in a finger snapping, just like that. The problem comes when he testifies one of his colleagues (Laurence Fishburne) being murdered by a drug dealer who uses their services as messenger to transport merchandising. And wouldn't be a successful 80's movie without a little romance between co-workers Bacon and Jami Gertz, and the main character's chance of redemption and rise back from where he started.The bike scenes offer a great deal of excitement (specially the race between Fishburne and Bacon), cool to watch, there's good comic relief with Paul Rodriguez character but most of the dramatic subplots are annoying and should be reduced if not cut from the film at all costs; if focused only on the thriller it might be better but the villain is quite obnoxious, not because of the character is more because of a bad performance from the actor. The driven force of "Quicksilver" - and I don't know if this was intentional or not - is that is practically showing how people can be creative in troubled times, finding useful solutions for their problems. Such clichéd positivism was quite alright, if only they didn't took a lot of time after a slow and very depressive beginning that is more inclined to make you turn off the movie than to watch it. Enjoyable for the majority of moments and because of the soundtrack - specially the Peter Frampton theme played at the opening scene. 7/10

To be honest, it's some years since I saw this movie, so have forgotten most of the story details. However, the film now seems rather obscure and apparently not very well regarded, so I wanted to put in my two cents worth of praise for a movie that, while it may not have been memorable, was certainly entertaining at the time. The story revolves around a hot shot stock market whiz kid named Jack Casey, who loses not only his own money, but also all his parents' life savings in a failed market deal / stock crash. Devastated by his failure, especially the effect it has on his father, he withdraws completely from the financial world, embarking upon a new career as a bicycle messenger. I enjoyed the unusual theme here, the disillusioned stock broker reverting to a simpler and (supposedly) more carefree lifestyle. Jack befriends his fellow messengers, including a guy, Voodoo, who's involved with delivering the goods for a sleazy drug dealer, and also a girl named Terri, who of course becomes the love interest. Jack and Voodoo plan a bike race, but there's trouble brewing from the drug dealer...Other plot details? I don't recall them, but Kevin Bacon is adept in the role of Jack, the story catchy enough, and the theme regarding the fleeting nature of wealth always relevant, particularly as related to the stock market. Also, although I'm not personally a cyclist, I quite enjoyed the dashing bicycle sequences, up and down and across the sometimes hilly streets, of (I believe) San Francisco. Don't listen to the naysayers, it's a perfectly entertaining way to spend a couple of hours, and not just for the 1980's nostalgia.

"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.