| TO KILL A DEAD MAN : Neveldine/Taylor's 'Crank' [7/10] |
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| Wednesday, 30 August 2006 | |
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Classic forties noir D.O.A. meets Speed with rock-the-house results in this self-consciously ludicrous Los Angeles-set thriller. A thoroughly disreputable affair that amps up the violence, drug use, swearing and sex at every possible opportunity to take full advantage of its R certificate (18 in the UK), Crank is essentially a a cartoonishly live-action cousin of Grand Theft Auto (SHOOT BAD GUY IN CHEST! HAVE SEX WITH GIRL IN PUBLIC! SNORT COKE OFF CRACK-DEN FLOOR! DRIVE LIKE MADMAN! SHOOT BAD GUY IN HEAD! SMASH UP CAR!), with a touch of Hitman for good measure. Writer-directors 'Neveldine/Taylor' (a billing that sounds more like the duo are estate-agents or accountants than filmmakers) make no bones about their debt to vide-games, dropping in a string of visual and verbal references to the upstart new-ish medium from start (title-card) to finish (post-credits animated coda). In a wild-eyed variation of his now-familiar screen persona (cf The Transporter etc) Jason Statham snarls and stamps his way through almost the entire running-time as 'Chev Chelios' - and that daft name counts as one of the less improbable elements here - a top-ranking mob-connected California-based hitman who happens to be a rough-diamond Cockney-geezer ("you plum!" ranks among his insults of choice). After being hired to bump off a Korean crime kingpin, Chev ends up being injected with the notoriously lethal "Beijing cocktail" - which means he has roughly an hour to live. He's informed by his physician (a droll Dwight Yoakam) that to stay alive he must maintain his adrenaline at the highest possible levels. This is the signal/excuse for a "wild rampage" of revenge against his own killers: a race against time across the streets of Los Angeles than isn't a million miles away from David R Ellis's Statham-starring Cellular; though the scuzzed-up, visually gimmicky style recalls Wayne Kramer's similarly disorienting and flagrantly-overcooked Running Scared. The results take a bit of getting used to: what seems at first like a deafeningly OTT, choppily-edited candidate for a straight-to-video fate gradually clicks into gear around the half-hour mark - as the cheesy 80s-style synths give way to a rousing nu-metal/punk/oi-based soundtrack. It's not exactly Point Blank, but there's something perversely admirable about the way outrageous set-piece so blithely follows outrageous set-piece. The film is also, crucially, often laugh-out-loud funny, partly because of the sheer chutzpah of Neveldine/Taylor's imagination (the film might just as well be called Cheek.) They seem engaged in an ongoing challenge to see what they can concoct to shock/surprise us with next. This includes what may be the first fellatio-during-car-chase in cinema history, during which Chev repeatedly tells his hapless girlfriend (Amy Smart, nothing if not game) to "Stay down!" - a line which only partly refers to the bad-guys' bullets zipping around his ears. The film is also slyly comic in a straight-faced kind of way, as when Chev bullies his way around a hospital (knocking over various elderly/ill patients as he goes) in search of a particular synthetic-adrenaline compound whose name he can't quite remember. "Ahm lookin fer sumfin beginnin wiv E," he barks at a nonplussed functionary - "England?" she blandly replies. And while we're being barrelled along by the raucously haphazard narrative's sheer kinetic thrust, there's always time for a throwaway grace-note to take us by surprise (one late-in-the-day visual flourish involving subtitles is particularly deft). And the whole thing culminates in a jawdropping final scene which confirms beyond doubt that the film, whatever its faults, at least has the total courage of its (dubious) convictions. Sensation-hungry audiences who ignored the lousy reviews heaped on Tony Scott's Domino last year should certaintly give this one a try: the similarly trashy/shameless Crank will undoubtedly be reviled as another harbinger of apocalypse by the sniffier critics, but does more than enough to satisfy the thrill-seeking teenage boy in us all. Neil Young 30th August, 2006 CRANK : [7/10] : USA 2006 : 'Neveldine/Taylor' [Mark NEVELDINE & Brian TAYLOR] : 88 mins (BBFC timing) seen at Odeon cinema, MetroCentre, Gateshead (UK), 30th August 2006 - press show |
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