Crank

Archieved Review
September 4th, 2006

Crank
Neveldine, Taylor, 2006



Crank is a one and a half hour movie about a guy who can’t stop moving or else he dies. The possibilities are infinite…and so are the chances of failure. Luckily for most audiences, Crank somehow is able to rise from the rubble and overcome many potential obstacles impeding success to become the first good, dare I say great action movie of the so far entirely lackluster year of 2006.

At first I wasn’t too sure what to think, or what I was even getting into. Crank opens with a first person view of our ‘hero’ Chev, after he wakes up with a throbbing headache. He stumbles around his apartment, but it felt quite uneasy. The way it was shot was quite odd, and the way it was edited was even stranger. There were weird sounds all over the place, and I felt like I was on some sort of drug. At this point I wasn’t too sure that Crank was going to live up to it’s potential.

However, after about ten or fifteen minutes the movie begins to hit the right stride, or maybe I just became used to the very unique visual and audio style. From here on in the movie kicks into full gear with Chev getting into some great fights and chases, including one in a house full of gun toting gangsters, and a police chase through a mall, or even a robbery of a convince store where the target is Red Bull energy drinks instead of money.

The action was really nicely done, and I love the way it was shot with the special high definition cameras, with loads of nice angles. However, what makes the action and ultimately the entire movie is the great sense humour which is injected into everything. Chev doesn’t really seem to loose his cool even though he is on the verge of dying the entire runtime, and he always seems to be doing something or saying something which made me, and the audience laugh. A good example is when he wants to get rid of a hasseling Arab taxi driver, he just yells out “al-Queda!”, and a crowd of people go to beat him up, including an old person with a cane! Racist, yes, but don’t worry, Chev hates everyone equally and he has a lot more to worry about being that he will die if he slows down.

Another massive asset to the sense of humour is the ditzy girlfriend played by Amy Smart. Chev and his girl really are the odd couple in Crank, because Chev is a hit man who can’t stop moving or he dies, and his girlfriend is well meaning, but a bit of a klutz and is quite naïve. Seeing them on screen together is hilarious because Chev is trying to get this or that accomplished and his girlfriend is always like, “Oh! I dropped my purse!” I loved when, outside of his girlfriend’s apartment, Chev fights off men sent to kill him and his girl while she picks up the contents of her purse which he dumped on the ground, and then rushes back to her like nothing happened. Oddly, the funniest moment was when one of the gunmen fired a stray shot and the movie cut to an old woman with a bird cage in the background. The bird explodes from the stray bullet, and so does the audience – in laughter – because it was just so random and yet oddly characteristic of the movie.

It was this combination between very well shot and very brutal violence along with the awesome sense of humour that really sold Crank to me and the audience I saw it with, which responded very well to it. Even watching the many ways Chev looks for to boost his adrenaline is great, and by the end of the movie you would think he would be dead from the amount of drugs he takes. However, my major complaint with Crank is that the last third of the movie just wasn’t quite the same as what came before it. The action set pieces are bigger with much more gunfire, but it just didn’t seem nearly as intense as the rest of the movie was. Maybe I had become desensitized, or maybe they just ran out of ideas for fight scenes, I don’t know. It wasn’t like it was terrible, but it just seemed much slower and not as frenzied as before. However, I did love the hilarious ending. I won’t give it away, but the ending completely embodies and encompasses everything that the movie did right, and ends it on a perfect and comical note.

Overall, I believe Crank to be a success because it takes an original idea, fuses it with original style and the end product is an action movie that is different than all the others. It’s fast, full of fury, and happens to be hilarious. Chev and his girl play off each other extremely well, and almost all the humour is spot on. The last third of Crank, unfortunately, drags it down a bit as it seems to loose its intensity, but it makes a come back with the perfectly executed ending. I’m proud to present Crank with the award for being the first well done, entertaining action movie of the year.