Connoisseur Tom's Review of the movie Crank.

Alternate title: "Why don't you just kick me right in the crotch?"

 

(Above) Jason Statham takes a moment to contemplate his state of general ennui.

I have one word for you, just one word: "EXTREME!!!!!!!!!"

Having just sat through one of the most harrowing movie-watching experiences of recent memory, I felt it necessary to put forth this warning to you: Do NOT see the movie Crank!

I haven't seen a movie suck this hard since Battlefield Earth, and that is saying something. I have never seen a movie so insulting to the viewing public, nor have I ever seen such an outrageously horrid acting performance out of actor Jason Statham. Statham has been is some of my favorite movies including the now-castrated Guy Ritchie's masterpiece Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. For most of the movie Crank, Statham seems to be ad-libbing unconvincing filler hoping for a redub that would never be, all the while Neveldine and Taylor, the dual directors of this tripe, turned a blind eye, their attention obviously too focused on snorting another line of blow off a hooker's ass.

The basic premise of the movie is that Statham's character has been injected with a mysterious cocktail of "Chinese Shit" which will kill him if his heart rate slows past some imaginary point, later in the movie the we are told the injection was an Adrenaline inhibitor which will kills the injected victim unless he gets all extreme with a capital X all over the bad guys' asses. 'Bad Guys' here implies to anyone with a hint of ethnicity or facial hair. Statham goes on a rampage around town loading up on caffeine (cue product shots for Rockstar and Red Bull), beating up on strangers, stealing stuff, and recklessly driving about. No one can stop him of course because he is, I assume, wicked jittery from all that extreme soda he's been drinking.

When the caffeine doesn't work well enough, he starts huffing nasal spray on the advice of a helpful extra reading magazines in a hospital pharmacy, and eventually shoots himself up with a lethal dose of, and here's your vocab word of the day kids (I can only assume because the director saw fit to spell it out on the screen multiple times) : Epinephrine… also known, apparently, as synthetic Adrenaline, which makes the hospital gown-clad Statham immediately pop wood and run around like a maniac for a while longer.

The movie has so many completely exploitative scenes, I couldn't possibly mention them all here, but here are a couple highlights. At one point, with his heart rate dropping after sticking his hand in a waffle iron (why not?) Statham decides the best cure for the blues is to forcefully screw his vapid girlfriend over a newspaper box in the heart of Chinatown. At another point in this piece of Art-House cinema, when his cabbie refuses to take him any farther, he starts shouting "Al-Qaeda! Al-Qaeda!" at which point his generically Middle Eastern cabbie is set upon by a throng of 40-something soccer moms who proceed to leap on him and break his arm. Now that's racial sensitivity! I can only imagine the kind of slack-jawed mouth breathers who consider a movie like this entertaining.

I guess the movie did end on a slightly positive note, albeit with some of the worst green screen work since the first Superman movie: Everybody died, so there is no threat of a sequel.