Crank: A Review--Crank! Crunk! Crap? Cramp!

Crank--A Review... Crank! Crunk! Crap? Cramp!

As uppity a proposition as it is for me to try to review films, I'm truly unqualified to assess Crank, the most recent over-heated, somewhat-less-than-single-minded vehicle for admirably, aggressively balding big screen Tough Bloke Jason Statham and his uncompromising wanker-stomping stylings. A prerequisite for reviewing this virtual, combustible olive branch to twitching Play Station militants should be a G.E.D. in the game-controller clutching arts and sciences. As an acne-addled and obese variation on Punch-Out's Glass Joe, I may have at some heady adolescent Cinderella moment staggered Mike Tyson, but this was only after lacing my ear lobes with laxatives, and tricking him into bloating himself on the bread of my unborn children well before bell time.

Crank is book ended (a rare literary analogy to be associated with this picture) by the crude eight-bit Nintendo imagery to which so many Double Dragon generation nervous systems are inescapably wired. This tactic is employed in part, perhaps, to let us know that the sensory blitzkrieg to which we're about to be subjected is to be (blindingly) seen in the synthetically throbbing vein of one of those games. It's also to hook our helpless arcade- afflicted consciousnesses into the increasingly inane action that ensues, even if we're not yet on the cutting edge (or the glazed eye) of the Grand Theft Auto set.

The movie is off, running, driving, cursing, shooting and humping well before you can finish flipping through your Frogger instruction manual (I'll continue to date myself as this review progresses). Statham is hit man (as opposed to cake decorator or wedding planner) Chev Chelios, who we immediately learn, in Need To Know arcade-game-prologue fashion, has been injected with a fatal dose of a fatal drug by rival Ricky Verona (Jose Pablo Cantillo). Verona briefs Chelios of his prognosis in a Video Presentation Exposition so over the top as to be a strange stereotypical cocktail: equal parts Scarface tribute (odd to accuse an authentic hispanic of aspiring to Cuban caricature), and a dutifully Hollywood Shuffling turn straight out of some Friday sequel (a fateful Oliver Stone-DJ Pooh collaboration, no doubt: Born on the Fourth Fortnight After the Last Any Given Friday).

Disregard the book burning disclaimer earlier in this review, as you may want to have a chemistry text handy, so that you may intravenously put yourself out of any viewing agony via this mystery narcotic, which I cannot for the sense-scorched life of me recall.

The rather entertaining trick of the picture, and the excuse for the breathlessly brutal tone and headlong, stampeding pace that follows, is that the only way for Chelios to remain alive, even ephemerally, is to keep his adrenaline at a constant boil, his heart at a healthy height of grotesque and relentless spasm. To save the unsavory Chelios' life for approximately 90 additional minutes, it is the filmmakers' selfless duty to leave no stone that might serve the causes of violence or sex unturned, unthrown or unthrusted. Desperate cinematic times necessitate similar measures, as the calculating barbarians casting motivational feces at their frantic cast from behind the camera have apparently observed.

Directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (Crank's writers are Neveldine, Brian Taylor, and Mark Taylor, a case of too many cooks at the crackpipe) know they are competing with a species of game increasingly convincingly cinematic in its presentation. Already promising the potent opiate of interactivity, such games are beginning to nip more aggressively at the silver screen's corners in terms of image sophistication and even celebrity participation. They also appear to know the overstimulated and benumbed savages with whom they believe they are dealing.

Chelios' cell phone spirit guide is Doc Miles (Dwight Yoakam), who medically elaborates upon his friend's fate, informing him what a blessed miracle it is that he's still alive and kicking his enemies to death. Crank is a bombastically fatalistic enterprise, for it increasingly becomes clear, even with telethon phones symphonically bleating, even with stem cell research rocketing through chambers of Congress once civilization gets wind of the contract killer's bind, that Chelios's life span is loping along on the fumes of an undetermined quantity of arcade game quarters.

Time to focus, then: on the adrenaline percolating thrill of devising Chelios' Theorem for solving pi, perhaps, or the diplomatic orgasm of cramming in a Middle East Peace accord? Alas, if only Chevy had the spare seconds to devote to such fruity pursuits. No, Chelios' poisoning has programmed him to confine himself to that Shakespearean & Sega Genesis theme of revenge, sans the pansy bureaucracy of soliloquies.

Statham's bristling brand of clenched virility seems to fit the simulated grit-criteria for a video game protagonist, in that his persona suggests he would surely scoff at any of the sedentary legion of transfixed geeks dedicating their vigorous years to the video game franchise in which he grudgingly starred.

One of the perks of Chev Chelios' poisoned state apparently allots him is a sort of Delirious Bigot's Carte Blanche. One of his last terminal condition testaments to a nemesis is a homophobic slur, and he shrewdly creates a Patriot Act-sponsored profiling diversion by screaming "Al Qaeda!" as he points at a disagreeable taxi driver the film's credits honor with the title "Arab Cabbie." Any number of recent celebrity racists might want to attribute their hatred to a Latino criminal's syringe, and see if this Crank defense flies.

This political incorrectness induced by poison at least lends the movie a fleeting tint of realism, although it also increases the likelihood in the viewer's flash fried mind that Chelios will only live as long as Crank does, so that we can wash our hands of any idea of him as a Hero as we stagger out of the theater (or to the Blockbuster return slot).

Crank's ridiculous climax comes as Chelios, looking to keep his life continually spiced, foists fornication upon his fraudulently blonde lady friend (dismissively named "Eve" (Amy Smart)), in a refreshingly al fresco setting. This sort of criminal spontaneity is standard fare in the Vice City realm, apparently. Her moniker suggests that she is to be ogled as some Fantasy Every Woman, pretty and breezily oblivious of the Harsh, Whacking and Intravenously Injecting Muck Through Which Real Men Wade Every Day (a slightly less catchy title than Crank, admittedly).

But of course, she is passingly aghast that her boyfriend would insist upon penetrating her in public, before they've finished their meal. Eventually, however, as we're all supposedly secretly aware, her ravenously adventurous feminine sexuality consumes her. In the end, she is so consummately game that, with spunky impatience, she starts to critique his crotch's difficulty in cashing the check its initial engorged insouciance signed scant moments ago! Ha Haah! Women! Who can figure out that ditsy flock of incessantly chirping birds? Why that cockney Shaft, Chev Chelios can, or haven't you been paying attention?

In the end, Crank is perhaps not even entirely imitating action movie predecessors; more likely, its pixellated grail is a video game adapted from some pre existing film (also featuring Jason Statham. Will the layers leading nowhere never end?). Ostensibly chasing a literal essence of human feeling, with an intriguing human predicament as its premise, Crank easily overshoots (or obliterates, I can't quite recall) its targets.

In the proud Sophisticated Contraption tradition of such pupil-torching classics as Blade II (The Next Day), if the movie itself does not succeed in disintegrating your nerve endings, the picture itself tends to dissolve. Having viewed Crank more than ten minutes ago, several vital plot points now escape singed memory.

In aiming to make more of a imprint, firing off their cannons of bright, deafening clutter, choking you with state of the art smoke, then bludgeoning you with a THX crash of brilliant mirrors, movies often render themselves still more disposable. It may be that a bit of the poison of compulsive spectacle-for-its-own-sake has trickled into the veins of the filmmakers. As challenging as it is to keep Chev Chelios murderously alive, Crank's cynical yankers appear to feel that effectively electro-shocking their jaded audience into placated awe and involvement is a still more daunting task.