Crud

Noel Vera

Mark Neveldin and Brian Taylor's "Crank" has a premise so dumb it's
brilliant, or could have been brilliant: a man named Chev Chelios
(Jason Statham) is injected with a poison (a "Beijing Cocktail;"
whatever), and has only an hour to live; the only way to temporarily
counteract the poison long enough to find the people who injected
him is to pump up his body's levels of adrenaline
(called 'epinephrine' in the US), which is secreted when one feels
strong emotions like fear, arousal, anger, so on and so forth. To
stay alive, in effect, Chelios has to stay pissed at his poisoners.

That's pretty much the movie. There's a lot of car crashes,
shootings, fistfights and whatnot, and the nastiest of it involves a
meat cleaver, but--seen this, done that. Given a premise that limits
one's course of action to sixty minutes of thrill-seeking, you'd
think the writer-directors would seek out real thrills, not just
limit Statham to doing the same things over and over again, only
harder and louder. Surely anyone with half a brain could put that
final hour of someone's life to better use.

The picture does reference other movies. The plot is an unholy
conflation of Jan de Bont's 1994 movie "Speed" with "DOA," the
former of which should have inspired this one to aspire to wittier
dialogue (writer-director Joss Whedon helped polish some lines in
the Keanu Reeves vehicle), the latter of which is a taut little
picture (I'm talking about Rudolph Mate's 1950 film starring Edmund
O'Brien) that could be a model for no-fat, no-nonsense (as opposed
to no-meat, no-brains) filmmaking. Along the way we get references
to Akira Kurosawa's great 1961 black comedy "Yojimbo" (a severed
hand), Tom Tykwer's 1998 "Run Lola Run" (a protagonist constantly on
the move; quick flashes of bystanders' inner thoughts) and--of all
things--John Schlesinger's 1970 "Midnight Cowboy." Don't know why
they would sneak that last one in, except maybe because they wanted
to use Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talkin'" as ironic commentary (that,
and the dubious novelty of using a song from a movie set in
Manhattan in a movie set in Los Angeles).

But this is all thumb-twiddling; you know a movie's in trouble if
the viewer has to start listing down movie references in his head to
stay awake, and you know a movie's really in trouble if all the
aforementioned referenced bring up memories of better movies than
what the viewer's presently watching.

Jason Statham--well, he's not all that expressive, but he does
radiate a physical, glowering intensity that makes one
think "killer," and he has enough skill with martial arts that
filmmakers can actually shoot him in fight scenes without cheating
too much on the editing (which they rarely do, unfortunately). I do
think he's been in funnier movies (Guy Richie's, for one), and that
he's been in better action sequences (those "Transporter" flicks,
for one), and he's even been in a movie with some wit and
imagination put into it (David Ellis' 2004 "Cellular," from a tossed-
off Larry Cohen story idea), but I can't say I've really liked
either him or his pictures, and this one doesn't help much in
changing my mind. There may be something underneath that thuglike
exterior, but no one's really been able to draw it out yet.

Easily the best thing in the movie is Amy Smart as Statham's
girlfriend, who plays dumb in a charming way, long legs, long neck
and all. Her standout scene with Statham in the middle of Chinatown
made me think of the faked-orgasm scene in Rob Reiner's 1989 "When
Harry Met Sally"--which isn't saying much (I thought Reiner's movie
was a bore overall), but the scene was fairly funny (and by far the
single best thing in there). Smart's Chinatown setpiece upstages
that one through sheer physical effrontery, though Statham leaves
Smart in mid-action without a comparable boffo punchline, like the
one Reiner's mother delivers in "Harry."

Actually, the movie doesn't leave Smart with much of anything. After
introducing her out of left field, having her wander around half-
naked in that sexy state a woman inhabits between half-asleep and
fully awake, then rousing her for that diverting Chinatown
interlude, the picture pretty much dumps her on the wayside.
Statham's Chelios is understandably rough on characters, but after a
certain point you can't help noticing that the characters he's
roughest on happen to be minorities--Latinos, Chinese, Arabs, Blacks-
-with women and the elderly thrown in for good measure. I can see
this being meant to be some kind of satiric point about the ethnic
mix in Los Angeles, but even if meant as such, it's more ugly and
mean-spirited than sharp and incisive, and not at all funny.

The ending is dumber than a box of rocks--it's as if, figuring they
had a good premise and they've run with it (well, limped) for eighty-
seven minutes, they'd just drop Statham (literally) and be done with
it. I can think of plenty of really stupid things I could have done
instead of spend the time watching this movie; I wish I'd done them
all, instead.

(First published in Businessworld, 9/15/06)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)