Crank
Directors: Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor

Lions Gate 2006

By Hunter Stephenson

Hollywood’s incoming progeny of film school John Romeros are getting coke-addled chubbies to Crank, especially now that it’s being properly discovered on DVD. The disc comes complete with a clever “Family Mode,” beating censors to bad dubbing, and perfect for Tinsel Town screening room parties if not improbable syndication.

Crank was overlooked in theatres, but if American movie-going was tweaked a mere five degrees, where Coming Home in a Body Bag 2 was a $200 million box-office reality, Crank would have been championed late last summer. Instead, it’ll appreciate gradually because the plot lives up, and dies ferociously, to its literal adrenaline-centric premise, surpassing Michael Bay’s Bad Boys 2 and imitators like Running Scared (and possibly Smokin’ Aces?) to become the best under-the-bus domestic action film this decade.

B-movie Brit Jason Statham advances from generic status as a modern Perfect Weapon after starring in the cheesy Transporter series and Guy Ritchie’s ambiguous gangster filmography by snorting coke off a dirty floor, holding up a convenient store for its massive, shitty energy-boost supply, and dogging out cast-a-slut Amy Smart in full view of stereotypically happy-happy Asian spectators. He coolly imbibes in these one-up acts of desperate nihilism while battling and simultaneously revving a bad ticker. You see, his heart’s been done-in by a gangster’s injection of gimmick-eat-gimmick, toxic “Beijing Cocktail,” and now requires impossibly repetitive shocks of adrenaline to keep pumping.

Even though I was aware of Crank’s well-referenced “holy shit” factor and preceded my viewing with a great A&E special on ignorant Slayer-doting Nazi skinheads to set the mood, I could not shake straight-to-disc cynicism. But young directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor are genuine gluttons, acquitting rare, admittedly stupid sequences of video game hyper-reality (a wrecked car going up a mall’s escalator) with awesome amphetamine-jolted pacing and paranoid distortion, for all of the film’s 87-minutes. Their showy technical prowess and chop-chop editing gel in ways Tony Scott can no longer justify. Moreover, Neveldine and Taylor forgo ubiquitous, trendy parkour and yet their wholly-American action flows with a similarly fresh effortlessness. Using the Loverboy song “Turn Me Loose” is enlightened tonal inspiration a la Ash’s “Kung Fu” in Rumble in the Bronx, with a Harry Nilsson song on the soundtrack as well.

Having a throwaway action hero face guaranteed cardiac arrest if he doesn’t slam every sequence from unneeded sequels into a single long, brutal, LA-contained line should be rewarded, both for the hellishly ambitious standard it sets for low-brow entertainment and the welcomed responsibility enacted for pop-culture.

This discourse of Crank is written by Hunter Stephenson for ignore Magazine, copyright 2007.