Crank

dir: Mark Neveldine and Mark Taylor

2006

Crank is an aggressively adrenalin-fuelled odyssey in the day of one lunatic in LA. This bad day for professional killer Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) is courtesy of being murdered by criminal rival Verona (Jose Pablo Cantillo).

He’s pretty loud and violent for a dead guy. Verona has given him a Chinese poison called the Beijing Cocktail which attacks the heart of its victim. If Chelios’s body doesn’t produce enough adrenalin to keep his heart rate up, he dies. He’s like the bus in Speed that can’t slow down or it will blow up.

The next 80 or so minutes are essentially Chelios doing two things: staying alive via keeping his adrenalin as high as possible, and tracking down Verona to get revenge before dying.

Yes, it’s as incoherent and stupid as it sounds. Actually, I made it sound linear and sensible, thus I’ve failed to encompass the true stupidity of what is on offer.

To keep his adrenals pumping, he commits robberies, gets into fights with large groups of black guys, uses cocaine, drinks heaps of caffeine drinks, takes on the cops, performs some idiotic stunts on a motorcycle, and fucks his deeply stupid girlfriend Eve (Amy Smart) in full view of a large crowd in Chinatown in broad daylight.

A few years ago I recall writing in a review about The Bourne Supremacy that it looked like a movie filmed and edited by crackmonkeys for crackmonkeys. Crackmonkeys isn’t a racial epithet or a euphemism for any humans: I mean literally for monkeys on crack. Crank puts the lie to my stupid analogy. Crank makes Bourne Supremacy look like a Merchant Ivory production about repressed beehive attendants in turn of the century Bangladesh by comparison.

Every scene, every frame, every moment of Crank is meant to approximate both the condition caused by the Chinese poison and the effects of stimulant drugs and adrenalin on the system. We become the crackmonkey through Chev’s eyes. As such, it is a hallucinatory and unbelievable experience.

My DVD player, as would most people’s players, has a function whereby you can speed up the playing speed of a movie by 1.5 times. The virtue of 1.5x speed is that the flick is sped up, but the sound and dialogue isn’t distorted as if The Chipmunks’s collective nuts are in a vice. The next level from there is 5 times, for which there’s no sound and there’s a few frames missing. All of Crank moves like it’s on 1.5, all the time.

Is there a virtue to being able to make something so ludicrous and hyperventilated? Well, even without the basics of characterisation or a perfunctory plot, or anything worthwhile apart from watching something disbelieving what you’re watching at every given second (or 1.5 second), you could argue that it is fun.

Crank is also the logical conclusion reached when someone wonders if they can make a movie without a script that would play out like one of the instalments in the infamous Rockstar Grand Theft Auto series of games. Why the hell not? Lots of computer and console geeks have spent months of their lives driving around these cities committing crimes, killing prostitutes and going on rampages over the last seven years via these games: why not make a ‘cinematic’ treatment that approximates that level of action abundant adolescent amorality?

Lest anyone think for a moment that I am looking down my snout at this level of entertainment or those games specifically and sniffing my disdain: think again. I love those games, and I can totally appreciate that particular level of entertaining madness.

But Crank wasn’t made with me in mind, because I actually like movies. I’m not sure exactly how stupid the target audience was intended to be, but I’m probably not quite stupid enough. The makers are making this for people who, like the evil Tyrannosaurus in Jurassic Park, are attracted to movement rather than detail.

The movie moves at breakneck pace from go to woe, and rarely pauses long enough for the audience to think “Hang on, does this make any sense?” No, stop thinking and just enjoy. But how does… No, stop thinking and just enjoy. And why does… NO. Just like what our hallowed politicians expect at election time – don’t think, just enjoy being screwed over once again.

Like Run Lola Run made for a Special Ed class by people who’ve never watched Run Lola Run the whole way through, Crank is about the virtue of movement for movement’s sake. As such, even without access to hardcore bikie-gang manufactured stimulant drugs like the title implies (crank being a street name for methamphetamines), it can still be a mindlessly entertaining flick.

You thought it was called Crank because it was about some strange old guy who lived in a one bedroom, cat-filled apartment overlooking a primary school who spends his days feeding his cats, writing Letters to the Editor in crayon and calling up talkback radio stations to complain about the Youth of Today listening to their jazz music and dancing the Charleston, the pesky brats.

Now that alternate plotline might have had more dramatic possibilities, but probably wouldn’t have been as violent. Nor would there have been a possibility for the single dumbest sex scene in cinema history.

As ferociously, unrepentantly stupid as this flick is, it’s probably going to become an action classic up there with Con Air, Die Hard and, I dunno, The Passion of the Christ. Which is to say, a dubious action classic, but a classic all the same. I felt like I was witness to the birth of the next 100 medium budget LA-based action flicks, because I can’t see this over-editing, all over the place kind of action movie making ever diminish. If anything they’re going to get so frenetic that, like that so-called ‘mosquito’ ringtone that only people under a certain age can hear, past a certain age it’s going to just look like an abstract expressionist painting to the rest of us. A blur of colour and sound that might be entertaining only to those who use a mobile phone, a Blackberry, paint their nails, read a celeb magazine and drive at the same time.

Jason Statham has defined his film career with these entirely silly but modestly entertaining action flicks like this and the Transporter flicks, which are even more ridiculous. For a guy who started off as a model he’s doing okay for himself in Hollywood. He comes out of it all right. He might not be much of an actor, and looks more like a retired rugby league player who’s still on the steroids, but he has fun with the role and looks like enough of a badass to pull it off. He has this way of walking in certain bits where he puts his head down, arms straight out and charging like a drunk bull that gets me every time. It makes me giggle like a school girl, and, take my word for it, I’m no school girl.

Crank is exactly the reason why videotape was invented back in the last century. Not DVD, mind you. Video. Had this flick come out in the 1980s, Jason Statham would now be the Governor of California, mark my words.

No illegal drug use is ever advisable, by any responsible person, to anyone impressionable or otherwise not in a position to make sensible judgements for themselves. But no-one ever tells you, as they tut-tut at people in the gutter or angrily ignore junkies begging for money, just how fun drug use can be. So, with Crank, use many, buy lots.

6 times this flick should get zero for being so haphazard and maniacally mindless but somehow compels me to say ‘yes’ to drugs out of 10

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“Who wants white meat? Huh? Who wants it?” - Crank