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.