Saturday, September 09, 2006

CRANK - if Guy Ritchie pre-Kabbalah and LeTerrier had a love-child, and that love-child had Medical Coke, a grudge and a gun

CRANK is about the most mindless high-octane balls-out fun you can have in a multiplex. It's visually audacious, witty, self-mocking and has one of the most shamelessly commercial endings I have seen in a while. On an intellectual level, I feel I should despise its deep vein of misogyny and superficial thrill-seeking, but the movie feels so tongue-in-cheek and does what it does so well, I just love it. LOVE IT.

CRANK bites heavily on the style of Guy Ritchie before Ritchie bit on Madonna's bad cinematic karma. But it has a much simpler plot than Ritchie ever dishes out and amps up the violence and pace. We are in the murky underworld of L.A. and
Jason Statham is a freelance hitman called, improbably, Chev Chelios. Chev has been injected by a lethal Beijing Injection whereby as soon as he lets his body slows down, he dies. Cue lots of running around and shooting people and outdoor sex in a bid to keep the adrenaline up long enough to settle all scores. Amy Smart plays Chev's dappy girlfriend. She serves as the straight man against which most of the comedy in the movie plays. SHAUN OF THE DEAD style, she can't quite believe her boyfriend is a zombie, sorry, hitman, and faffs around with her lip-gloss when she should be running for her life. Awesome.

CRANK is on release in Ireland, the US and Turkey. It opens in the Philippines, Greece, Denmark and Estonia next week and in Germany, Iceland and Latvia the week after that. It opens in Spain on October 6th, Sweden on October 13th and in Argentina on November 16th.


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