Chris Knipp
09-05-2006, 11:08 PM
Let's get crankin'--or not. . .
Crank is the last gasp of 2006's summer popcorn movies, a story about a powerhouse hit man assigned to kill a Chinese gang leader who gets fed some Chinese poison that cuts off his adrenalin and will cause him to die. John Stratham -- who got his start (after the UK Olympic swimming team and fashion modeling) in those arch little Brit noirs Guy Ritchie made -- is the hit man, and many absurd and violent scenes follow as he tries to track down enemies and get his doctor (Dwight Yoakum, a cozily sleazy sawbones) to save his own life. In the meantime he has to keep his adrenalin, and presumably ours, flowing by an outrageous series of desperate measures both large and small, ranging from drinking Red Bull from a Seven Eleven whose clerk he's just mugged all the way through smashing his own hand in a hot waffle iron; taking some Haitian potion offered by a cab driver; snorting coke off the floor of a black gangster's den, having sex with his girlfriend in front of a cheering Chinatown crowd; shooting up epiphedrine stolen from a hospital, and driving his own car through a department store and crashing it on an escalator.
Not a new theme, this, the man running against death on a poisoned cocktail that makes him violent. All that's really new is that there are a lot of cell phones and the visual effects are trickier and more colorful. It's meant to be exciting and/or funny, but it isn't often really either. What it is, is loudly energetic and visually (sometimes) dazzling. Corny though the effect is by now, I liked the bleached-out distressed frames (echoes of Spun and Requiem for a Dream) used when Chev Chelios (Stratham -- "Poison in his veins…vengeance in his heart") shoots up a whole container of epiphedrine and gets super-cranked. I liked the spiffy, over-muscled gang lord heavies of various ethnicities, among whom Jose Pablo Cantillo stands out: he makes just the cutest muscle-bound baby-faced Latino goon. And I liked the way one scene seems to be invaded by objects and characters from the scene that's about to follow it, just before it does. Mostly Chev just seems to knock down things and people. But he does give a stunning show of a man on a rampage.
At times this movie -- like so many attempts at violent hipness that are free with their language and not concerned with political correctness -- seems like a manic sequence stolen from Tarantino. But it's Tarantino drained of most of his dialogue and all of his cunning plot twists, so that doesn't leave us with much. Content-wise, this makes Wayne Kramer's absurdly kinetic Running Scared look like Ingmar Bergman.
Still, if you don't mind the occasional severed body part; are cool with guys getting beaten to a pulp just off-screen; and want some fast, violent, colorful distraction, this may be a good eighty-three minutes for you.
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P.s. I was a little hard on both Factotum (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?t=580) (directed by Bent Hamer, with Matt Dillon as the Bukowski character) and Ryan Fleck's debut Half Nelson (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?t=581) (with Ryan Gosling as the young crackhead schoolteacher) when they were previewed at the San Francisco Film Festival, but now that they're playing in theaters against the dribs and drabs of the dying summer movie season, they're looking pretty good. Both films have an independence and edge that set them apart from the throng.
Crank is the last gasp of 2006's summer popcorn movies, a story about a powerhouse hit man assigned to kill a Chinese gang leader who gets fed some Chinese poison that cuts off his adrenalin and will cause him to die. John Stratham -- who got his start (after the UK Olympic swimming team and fashion modeling) in those arch little Brit noirs Guy Ritchie made -- is the hit man, and many absurd and violent scenes follow as he tries to track down enemies and get his doctor (Dwight Yoakum, a cozily sleazy sawbones) to save his own life. In the meantime he has to keep his adrenalin, and presumably ours, flowing by an outrageous series of desperate measures both large and small, ranging from drinking Red Bull from a Seven Eleven whose clerk he's just mugged all the way through smashing his own hand in a hot waffle iron; taking some Haitian potion offered by a cab driver; snorting coke off the floor of a black gangster's den, having sex with his girlfriend in front of a cheering Chinatown crowd; shooting up epiphedrine stolen from a hospital, and driving his own car through a department store and crashing it on an escalator.
Not a new theme, this, the man running against death on a poisoned cocktail that makes him violent. All that's really new is that there are a lot of cell phones and the visual effects are trickier and more colorful. It's meant to be exciting and/or funny, but it isn't often really either. What it is, is loudly energetic and visually (sometimes) dazzling. Corny though the effect is by now, I liked the bleached-out distressed frames (echoes of Spun and Requiem for a Dream) used when Chev Chelios (Stratham -- "Poison in his veins…vengeance in his heart") shoots up a whole container of epiphedrine and gets super-cranked. I liked the spiffy, over-muscled gang lord heavies of various ethnicities, among whom Jose Pablo Cantillo stands out: he makes just the cutest muscle-bound baby-faced Latino goon. And I liked the way one scene seems to be invaded by objects and characters from the scene that's about to follow it, just before it does. Mostly Chev just seems to knock down things and people. But he does give a stunning show of a man on a rampage.
At times this movie -- like so many attempts at violent hipness that are free with their language and not concerned with political correctness -- seems like a manic sequence stolen from Tarantino. But it's Tarantino drained of most of his dialogue and all of his cunning plot twists, so that doesn't leave us with much. Content-wise, this makes Wayne Kramer's absurdly kinetic Running Scared look like Ingmar Bergman.
Still, if you don't mind the occasional severed body part; are cool with guys getting beaten to a pulp just off-screen; and want some fast, violent, colorful distraction, this may be a good eighty-three minutes for you.
_____________
P.s. I was a little hard on both Factotum (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?t=580) (directed by Bent Hamer, with Matt Dillon as the Bukowski character) and Ryan Fleck's debut Half Nelson (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?t=581) (with Ryan Gosling as the young crackhead schoolteacher) when they were previewed at the San Francisco Film Festival, but now that they're playing in theaters against the dribs and drabs of the dying summer movie season, they're looking pretty good. Both films have an independence and edge that set them apart from the throng.