I saw quite a few films and read a few books in 2007, noted them on my notes.doc, gave them review scores, but I was busy with college, recovering from a broken heart, and various other distractions, and I never got around to writing up longer reviews. Since I'm scheduling in more time to write (fiction and other) this year, and trying to update something on this site at least once a day, I'm going back over my notes and writing up the reviews; at least the ones I can remember well enough to comment on at this point.
So, here's a review of a movie I saw six or eight months ago. Available now, on DVD!
Crank is a very a clever idea for an action movie, and I will share that concept... right below the scores. Unfortunately, it's mostly concept, and little execution. The film is far less good than it could/should have been, for various reasons I'll delve into below, and sadly, I can't recommend this to anyone other than die hard action movie buffs. And even they (we) won't be that happy with it, since there are just so many things it could have done so much better than it did them.
To the scores:
Crank
Script/Story: 6
Acting/Casting: 6
Action: 7
Eye Candy: 4
Fun Factor: 5
Replayability: 4
Overall: 5
Crank is an action "adventure" staring Jason Statham and a lot of bodies. He's the bald, action star guy you might have seen in
The Transporter and lots of other recent action films. This one should have been a winner, with one of the better premises ever for an action movie: Statham's a tough guy assassin who has been drugged with some synthetic drug that will kill him in about an hour. He can live longer, but only by keeping his heart rate up and his adrenaline pumping. So he's got limited time to track down the bad guy, who left him a DVD taunting him with the fact of his drugging, and find a cure, or at least take revenge.
By necessity, Statham has to constantly seek greater thrills and action pursuits, so he does stuff like pick fights with pool halls full of big bad black guys, steal police motorcycles and joy ride, drive the wrong way through traffic, snort coke and gobble pills, and force his girlfriend into frantic public sex in a moment of "must boost my heart rate" desperation. The concept is very clever, for the genre, but the execution just doesn't pull it off that well.
I think this would have been a much better film with a real actor in the lead. It's an action movie, and it's okay on that level, but it could have been more. Statham is an action hero type, and like Stallone and Schwarzenegger and his other predecessors. He has some screen presence and some acting skill, but emoting isn't one of them. Like most action stars, he's good at playing a cool guy under pressure, since he doesn't show emotion. That's great when he's the Transporter, but for this role it's a handicap, since his character is constantly doing things that we know are raising his heart rate, but when the actor himself never changes expression, it's hard to believe it. Much less empathize.
The action sequences aren't that good either, and they're way too episodic. Some crazy stuff happens, Statham survives it emotionlessly, and then he's driving across town for 20 minutes while gobbling Tic-Tacs and chugging Red Bulls to keep his heart rate up. Occasionally after several minutes of not fighting for his life, he starts wavering and we get a POV shot with blurry camera effects. He's always able to snap out of it though, apparently by force of will. Try that yourself. Concentrate right now, and raise your heart rate. It's said that yogis can do that sort of thing, but not so much for the rest of us, and it's not enough that Statham just does some quick pushups or leg lifts; he has to keep adrenaline rushing or he'll shut down and die. Seems impossible, doesn't it?
Unfortunately, it is. He should have dropped dead a dozen times during the course of the film, pretty much any time he had more than five minutes of non-action, but he pulls through them all. Some of the events are inventive and creative, but they get old less than halfway through, and the film just becomes kind of tiring. I think this one needed a dual storyline of some sort. Statham is the lead and the story goes with him 95% of the time, but that wears out the novelty of his situation way before 90 minutes elapse. If he'd been drugged halfway through the film, it might have sustained a truly frantic second half, or if we'd kept cutting to scenes of other characters, we would have been primed for more action when it cut back to Statham. Instead his last hour of life seems to last about 12 hours, and the attempts at plot mechanizations, as he seeks out the guy who drugged him, kills various minions and underlings, etc, are farfetched and irrelevant. There is an attempt at a larger storyline, with the mid-level bad guy feuding with the higher level one, and gangs fighting each other, but we care nothing about that, and all the half-hearted attempts at subplotting are just distractions that turn into a deus ex machina scenarios when Statham needs outside assistance to save him from various inextricable situations.
True,
Crank isn't meant to be a realistic film; too many wild coincidences and weird things happen, and none of the characters in the film act with real human emotions. Dozens of guys die without any regrets or concerns, and while that's kind of standard for the genre, it makes the movie seem very videogame. They pop up just to get mowed down, and if they don't even care about their own deaths, why should the viewer? It's not quite farcical though, since it's realistic and even maudlin in other ways, and the result is an uneasy mixture of exciting but repetitious action, boring repetitious action, and characters who either have no emotion at all, or are weeping, hysterical messes.
Better plot, better writing, better acting, and this could have been a really good film. But then again, isn't that true of everything coming out of Hollywood?
Labels: movie review
