Crank: Speed on a Thug

Not too long ago, I caught a packed late night showing of Crank, the recent hyperactive ghetto gangster film starring Jason Statham as a thug who, after being injected with a deadly drug, goes after his attackers while trying to keep his adrenalin pumped to the max—as he must in order to stay alive. As many have noted, you might call it "Speed on a thug." It’s a cruel, misogynistic, gratuitously violent exploitation film, and as much as I found it repulsive, I have to say I also found it pretty damn entertaining. Why? Because, as amoral gutter cinema goes, it knew its audience and gave them exactly what they wanted: an unrelenting procession of inner city machismo, crass ethnic stereotypes, gut busting violence, and bloody-minded, lowbrow, macabre humor.

Basically, Crank is the unofficial movie adaptation of Grand Theft Auto, a pumped up, frantically-stylized celebration of the thug ethos. As one might expect from a movie with such an absurd, literally testosterone-driven premise, everything is tweaked to max; if the movie had a pulse it would thump at a thousand beats per minute. This means that there’s barely any time for any of the boring filler that too often finds its way into these films. Every scene is about action, and that means that no matter what else, the movie is always ready and willing to entertain.

So I appreciated, in the way that one appreciates unreprentant lowbrow thrills, a lot of what it did. And if it hadn’t been so casually vulgar in its violence, I might’ve even counted it as reasonable-quality “silly movie”—the sort of violence-fueled guilty pleasure I might’ve returned to sometime. But the movie is the product of an utterly desensitized video game generation, and as such, it doesn’t know when to quit. I don’t usually object to action films going over the top, but Crank’s violence lacks the sort of wit it takes to pull off its brand of violent chuckles. In Blade, the gimmick with the vampire henchman who kept having his hand--the same hand--chopped off was clever enough to be funny; too often, Crank’s grisly jollies are just icky.