Crank (Widescreen Edition) | DVD Review

Where to start? With no seeming purpose to it other than to try to thrill the audience with non-stop action, Crank fails miserably as a film, but it would make a great video game. In fact, it already has been made as a video game: Grand Theft Auto.

Many critics have derided Crank as a weak cross between 1994’s Speed and the classic 50’s noir D.O.A., but the premise of the film is actually quite promising. Chev Chelios (Jason Statham, The Transporter), a hitman with more than a few enemies, wakes up one morning to find he’s been poisoned and will die within an hour unless he can keep his adrenaline pumping at an insane rate. This is where the innovation ends, though. What follows is over an hour’s worth of violent and profane action sequences in which Chelios does anything and everything to keep the adrenaline coursing through his veins while he tries to find the person who did this to him. The problem is that a good idea alone rarely translates into a strong action film.

Where co-writers and -directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor fail is in the actual transition to the screen of their admittedly strong idea. First, as writers, they cranked out the script (sorry, couldn’t resist it) in four days and obviously didn’t care much about developing the characters. Even Chelios, despite Statham’s natural on-screen charm as an action hero, doesn’t go much beyond the cliche of wanting to “get out of the business”. Then they proceed to inundate us with every flashy camera trick that they learned as video and commercial dierectors without pause for us to catch our breath. Sure, they’re trying to make the audience feel the urgency and the highs and lows experienced by Chelios, but it’s too much; it’s sensory overload. What Crank amounts to is an 87-minute music video full of physical brutality, robbery, drugging, and sex. It’s alright to be a fan of these types of things in film, but one must also realize that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

It’s really a shame, because the relatively strong cast is wasted on the thinnest of plots. Statham, Amy Smart (Varsity Blues, The Buttefly Effect) and Efren Ramirez (Pablo from Napoleon Dynamite) all do their best to elevate the material they’ve been given, but the only one who can really walk away from this film with his head held high is Dwight Yoakam (Sling Blade, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada): his sleazy Doc Miles is a hilarious portrayal of a man who is not even fazed by the fact that his friend is going to die in an hour.

The widescreen transfer is extremely well done; the images are sharp and the colors are vivid. The sound is passable, but it’s a bit murky at times and the film only really takes advantage of the 5.1 Surround during the climactic gun battle.
As for the special features, whoever put this DVD release together must have thought it would be funny to force us to sit through the whole movie again just to see the featurettes. You see, what they’ve done is create something called the Crank’d Out Mode of watching the movie, in which little pop-ups of the director commentary, cast interviews, and behind the scenes footage are put into the movie so you can watch them at the appropriate points of the film. As if there wasn’t enough sensory overload already. I’ll admit, I couldn’t stomach watching the whole thing over again, so I just watched a few minutes of this feature.
Apart from a music video, the only other feature on the disc is the Family Friendly audio option, which the directors inform us is how Crank would be shown on basic cable. I didn’t watch this either, as it would have entailed having to watch the movie again, but I’d have to think it would be pretty funny to hear the words they use to replace every second or third word that’s uttered in Crank, all while not one iota of the violence or sex is excised from the movie. Family friendly indeed!

After having spent the past few paragraphs disparaging Crank, I must say that for all its shortcomings, the film still manages to be entertaining in its own way. If non-stop action and B-movie dialogue are your thing, then Crank is definitely worth a rental. However, be warned that you may come away from this guilty pleasure feeling a little too cranked up for your own good.

Movie rating – 2

Disc Rating – 1.5