The December Project: Film #1

What?

What!?

Crank is, in a sense, awful. I mean it's really, really dreadful. It looks as though a madman managed to get the entire editorial facilities of a cheap piece of software, give it a chunk of footage, and randomly select one style for each scene. It's mad. It's absolutely mad. It makes no sense at all. And that's precisely why I liked it so much. No film I have ever seen better evidences the purposes of beginning a narrative in media res: "in the middle of things". It's maybe half an hour before you're given any idea whatsoever of what's actually happening, so frenetic is the pacing of the action. Normally such mania…

I have thought about this for a couple of days now. How can I describe Crank? What can I possibly say that accurately reflects what sort of movie this is? The only answer is either going to be "with great difficulty" or "not at all."

The first thing that I thought about Crank after the opening scene with Statham awaking to find he has been poisoned and has less than an hour to live, is that it's going to be an interesting film! The POV camera, almost as if you're in a computer game, is only the start of things.

The pace of this film is just non-stop. The writers/directors take this concept of a man who must keep his…

Written and directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, this fast-paced anf frantic film enters on a British hitman in Los Angeles named Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) who is poisoned and must keep his adrenaline flowing constantly in order to keep himself alive. To do so he has sex in public with girlfriend Amy Smart, gets into bone crunching fights with other gangsters, has altercations with the police, and takes numerous drugs. The film's title comes from the slang word for "methamphetamine."

Basically, Chelios was part of a hit gone wrong and so the Chinese gangsters involved have tracked him down for payback, but it's Chelios who will dispense payback if he can stay alive long enough to find them…

The marriage of the style and content, of the film's human-as-compulsive-march-toward-solipsistic-excess framework and Neveldine & Taylor's hungrily frenetic pacing and visual style, is perfect enough that it may genetically qualify as incest.

The film's video game sired twin qualities of an intensely focused restlessness, and the resultant myopic denial of the severity of consequence of action, are quite clearly deployed in a satirical sense. N/T are, beyond their audaciously unrestrained camera work, fashioning a mirror from the writ-large materials of their milieu. The breadth of this embrace commendably doesn't exclude the uglier aspects of the culture they so fully articulate; the film is rife with instances of misogyny and racism varying between being tacit and explicit.

This gesture is appreciated, but,…