There is a very brief period of many peoples’ young lives, usually sometime in junior high school or high school, when it is cool to be a loser, to reject social norms and render oneself an outcast. The girls girls develop huge crushes on the guys that ditch school and get in trouble with the police and have disastrous relationships with their parents. That period of life does not, however, extend beyond high school, which might be why 21-year-old Jimmy (played by a plump, 30-year-old Eddie Furlong) seems only abot to get a high school girl to fall in love with him.

I love the irony here. Judy is clearly a smart and successful student who one day is attacked by a group of girls, the “bad” kids (by the way, do high school girls really do this? Definitely not when I was in school…), which Jimmy catches on tape because he films everything. Later he exacts vicious revenge on two of the girls involved in the attack and shows it to Judy, who is horrified at the violence but ultimately touched that he would look out for her in such a way. Soon afterwards she falls intensely in love with Jimmy, who is not a far cry removed from the same kinds of jerks that attacked her in the first place.

This is going to be a film that most people will either love or hate, although I happen to have strongly disliked it, but I didn’t hate it. It’s an extremely simply made film, shot almost entirely from the perspective of a home video camera and cut for the most part to run like an unedited MiniDV tape. There won’t be any concern about motion sickness, but it’s an intensely realistic portrayal of the lives of a couple of genuinely screwed up kids. The result, however, is that a good majority of the movie is genuinely and deliberately unpleasant.

Personally, I knew a lot of people like Jimmy (minus the killing) in high school because I hung out with the wrong people for a couple years. These are the guys that never go home because they hate their parents and are always drunk or on drugs. I don’t know why anyone hangs out with people like that, they are highly unpleasant to be around, particularly the nutty ones like the crackhead that Jimmy and Judy shack up with for a couple hours midway through the movie. I like movies that bring back fun memories from high school. Jimmy and Judy brings back memories, but all the wrong ones.

I bought the movie, by the way, because I was curious to see what Eddie Furlong was up to these days. He was phenomenal in Terminator 2 but his career never really seemed to go anywhere after that, except for his outstanding role in the brilliant 1998 film American History X. Sadly, this movie doesn’t come remotely close to it in any way. I don’t know much about Eddie’s personal life, but he is a little TOO good at playing a dirtbag in Jimmy and Judy. It’s also interesting that he looks so handsome on the cover box, because little Eddie has become quite the meatball.

Anyway, his Jimmy in this movie is an unhinged lunatic with absolutely no redeeming values whatsoever, while Judy is pretty and smart. Whether you like the movie or not, believing her interest in him is no small feat. They are polar opposites and it’s nearly impossible to understand what she sees in him, but their chemistry works well enough so I guess it doesn’t matter. We do, however, see in great detail why Jimmy is so twisted (we are, after all, products of our environment, and his parents’ relationship is one of the sickest marriages I’ve ever seen, in a movie or otherwise), but we learn nothing about Judy’s past, including why she was being bullied at school.

But the worst part of all, by far, is this ridiculous commune at the end of the film. It is a mixture of a twisted cult group and what I imagine Woodstock must have looked like. You see, there is some insane fanatic known as Uncle Rodney who has started this as a place for trashy people to go live. I think his exact words were “garbage people,” meaning they are the garbage of society. You can see the appeal in seeking membership.

This Rodney is played by William Sadler, who must never have had a more pointless role. The only purpose he serves here is to make this already trashy movie look like preachy crap. You can feel yourself being punched in the face with the transparent “social commentary” when he gives his goofy, fiery speech near the end of the movie. You see, apparently he believes that by providing this retreat for the trash of society, they’ll become stronger with each new drug addict that they gain, while the “outside world” gets weaker with every one, until they become so strong that they can rain garbage on the world that threw them away and then, and this is an actual quote, “fornicate in their ashes.” Are you hearing this? WOW.

I would hate to be the one to burst his balloon, but I have a feeling that the subtraction of a lot of criminals and junkies and drunks is not exactly going to make society weaker…

Ultimately, the movie starts off as a serious downer and goes downhill from there. I was thoroughly depressed by the time it was over and couldn’t even take my afternoon nap. I hate that.

Note: a reviewer on the IMDb called this the “best film at the San Fran Indie Fest.” Boy am I glad I missed that one. And by the way, some lunatic from the San Francisco Chronicle has claimed that this is the movie that Natural Born Killers wanted to be, and at 1/20th of the cost.

Yeah, right. They spent $500,000 on this? Scary. I would say that not more than about $1,200 made it onto the screen….

1 Bean out of 5.

It’s no accident that Crank is named after a hardcore narcotic, and while I don’t happen to have any personal experience with it myself, I imagine that if the experience were made into a cinematic version it would look something like this movie. It feels like a fast-paced action movie boiled down to it’s basest elements, with pesky things like character and plot development mostly tossed out the window. Or out of the helicopter, whichever looks better with a death metal soundtrack.

A lesser movie, however, would have made such a simplified approach feel exploitative and cheap, but Crank gives the feeling that such baggage would only slow things down, which is just contrary to the whole idea. I can respect that.

There is no set-up, we are immediately thrown into a life-threatening situation where Jason Statham’s character Chev Chelios stumbles out of a daze and finds a video left for him by a Hispanic gangster, who gleefully explains that he has injected a “Beijing cocktail” of synthetic something or other. The details are not important, what matters is that he now has an estimated hour or so to live until the drugs cause his heart to stop. The only way to survive, of course, is to keep his heart pounding and the adrenaline pumping through his veins. It’s sort of like Speed, except it’s his body that can’t slow down, not a bus.

And basically that’s about all there is to the story. The premise is mostly an excuse for Jason Statham to run screaming through the streets (and hospitals, as it were) of Los Angeles with a level of disregard for the law that by itself is enough reason to watch the movie. There is a part of the movie where Chelios is speeding down the street on a stolen LAPD motorcycle wearing nothing but a hospital gown and a gun. Try to imagine a situation which would lead to something like that, and you’ll have some idea of what your frame of mind will be like while watching the movie.

My only real problem with the movie is Amy Smart’s character, who is written ridiculously wrong. Chev Chelios is given some minute background as a contract killer for a widespread crime syndicate, sort of like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in True Lies but without quite so much government backing, and his girlfriend is this air-headed blonde who thinks he’s a video game programmer. Chelios is collected and focused even while drugged and on the verge of death. He concentrates a hard-edged anger on his enemies, and his girlfriend hiccups and grins like an imbecile when he tries to get her to get dressed and get out of the house before he drops dead on the spot.

“Are we going on a trip?” she blurts.

You get the idea. Their relationship is so wrong and so ineffective that it probably would have made more sense if she had been cast as his daughter instead. Then again, that would mess up their upcoming scene in Chinatown, but I’ll leave that for you to find out about.

The main villain, a punk gangster curiously named Verona (and yes, he does invoke Shakespeare’s name early in the movie), is also wildly overacted most of the time, but that’s in fitting with the rest of the film. If Jose Cantillo had delivered a subdued performance he would have looked totally out of place, like the girlfriend, who really serves no purpose other than to enter the film in her underwear and, you know, the Chinatown thing.

Amy Smart's character doesn't live up to her name in Crank...

There is, of course, some great humor in the movie, which is to be expected in this kind of over-the-top action comedy. It’s brutally violent but knows when to slow down for a few laughs, and many of the laughs are real. There is a great periodic interaction between Chelios and his shady doctor buddy, played by Dwight Yoakam, who is out of town and can only help over the phone but who calmly explains while on crowded planes and such that the fire in his chest and his steely erection are perfectly normal for what he’s suffering from, but that if he doesn’t keep his adrenaline pumping he’s gonna die.

But for the most part, Crank is a hard boiled action movie that is specifically designed to give directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor free reign to bombard your senses with every little trick they can imagine, which includes split screens, animated views of the pounding hearts of humans and pigeons alike, car chases, gun fights, dazed point of view shots, subtitles viewed from both sides, and even a couple of shots where people that Chelios is speaking to appear on screen – once projected onto a nearby wall and once, briefly, in a side-view mirror as Chelios speeds down the street.

Crank was made with a very specific audience in mind, and for what that audience wants to see, the movie definitely delivers. There will, of course, be plenty of people who will attack the movie for being shallow or exploitative or too violent or for having an ending that didn’t wrap everything up in a nice little package or whatever, but the fact that there is a Crank 2 coming up  seems to answer the one big question that many people have had about the ending. Personally I didn’t see how there was any mystery. The end of the movie fits perfectly with the rest of it. It’s totally outlandish and preposterous, but if you don’t get a thrill from the last half second of this movie, you missed something.

4.5 Beans out of 5.