Crank N' Mank Month #5 Crank (2006)
I cannot for the life of me imagine why it has taken me a decade and a half to treat myself to the delirious pleasure of Neveldine and Taylor’s 2006 masterpiece Crank.
Crank is a movie you don’t see so much as you experience it with all your senses. It’s a supremely tactile endeavor, a movie you don’t just watch but smell and touch and feel deep down in your soul as well as your vital organs.
The phrase “testosterone-fueled thrill ride” is almost invariably used in jest, with a distinct element of sarcasm but “testosterone-fueled thrill ride” can’t begin to do justice to Crank’s balls to the wall approach to action.
Yet I nevertheless have written about Crank and its 2009 sequel Crank: High Voltage as vulgar, trashy pulp cult classics that made all of Neveldine/Taylor and Jason Statham’s other projects seem even more hopelessly inadequate and insufficient by comparison.
This happens very infrequently, so I really need to savor it, but it turns out that I was right! Crank and Crank 2: High Voltage are, in fact, masterpieces that make all of Neveldine/Taylor and Jason Statham’s other projects seem worse by comparison.
It’s taken me fifteen years and a transcendently silly project like Crank N’ Mank month here at the Happy Place to finally catch up with Crank but I am pleased to report that it and its sequel more than lived up to their reputations for craziness and sheer entertainment.
That’s good because I have had a difficult week. I was hoping to launch The Weird A-Coloring to Al, the “Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book I am doing with the great Felipe Sobreiro, who did the illustrations for The Weird Accordion to Al but the Amazon self-publishing system is full of frustrating glitches.
Thankfully I have the kind of job and career where I am professionally obligated to watch and write about Crank and Crank 2: High Voltage so why not distract myself with a double feature of Neveldine and Taylor’s finest?
Crank opens with massively hung badass English hitman Chev Chelios waking up to some very bad news: he’s a dead man walking after being injected with a potent cocktail of lethal chemicals known as “The Chinese Shit” that inhibits the flow of adrenaline to the heart, leading it to very quickly stop working.
The appropriately freaked-out Cockney man of action calls up his sketchy pal Doc Miles (a scene stealing Dwight Yoakam, underplaying a juicy part perfectly), a disgraced former heart surgeon happily marinating in his own sleaze.
The wildly unethical doc tells his towering pal that the only thing that can keep him alive long enough to get revenge or find an antidote are non-stop jolts of adrenaline.
Chev is already a criminal and a thrill seeker. Knowing that he will die unless he is constantly stimulated on a dangerous, extreme level transforms him into a manic sociopath who acts without thinking or forethought because if he thinks too long about anything, or thinks at all, really, his heart will stop beating and he will die.
Chev consequently becomes an amoral nihilist single-mindedly devoted to getting the sick thrills that will get his blood pumping and hold off death for just a little while longer.
It doesn’t matter who our bullet-headed hero hurts or what laws or moral codes he has to flagrantly defy: the only thing on his mind is staying alive by living as dangerously and shamelessly as possible.
The hitman with the rippling muscles and air of unhinged intensity snorts cocaine and deliberately gets into fisticuffs with dangerous dudes before discovering that he can buy himself at least a little bit more time by injecting Ephedrine so he heads to a hospital to score some by any means necessary.
In a sweaty panic, Chev meets up with girlfriend Eve (Amy Smart, looking disconcertingly like Gabby Petito) and surprises her with the revelation that he’s an in-demand hired killer rather a video game developer like she thought. Oh, and also he’s going to die imminently if he slows down even a little.
In a particularly memorable comic set-piece in a movie overflowing with them, Chev decides to get the blood pumping and make good use of his enormous, rock-hard penis by having sex with Eve in front of hundreds of shocked, entertained and horny bystanders.
When Crank commits to something, it commits to it on an almost frightening, pathological level. Chev doesn’t just have public sex with Eve in order to postpone meeting the Grim Reaper; he rails her ecstatically in front of seemingly Los Angeles’ entire Asian community, who are into it only slightly less than Eve is.
Crank has the transcendently trashy charm and manic energy of a classic early Ramones anthem. It’s all killer, no filler, an endless series of climaxes and killer hooks strung together with an exquisitely loopy premise and a stellar lead performance by the perfectly cast Statham.
A sequence where our anti-hero stands on the seat of a speeding motorcycle with his arms out in a Christ pose as his bare ass and naked member hang defiantly out of his loose-fitting hospital gown to the accompaniment of Harry Nillson’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” represents the apex of cinema as an art form.
Action filmmakers of the world might as well have hung it up after Crank because there was no way anyone was ever topping sequences like that.
Despite not technically being a video game movie in any way, Crank is not just a good video game movie but a perfect video game movie, the best damn video game movie ever made, with the possible exception of Scott Pilgrim Versus the World, which similarly had the advantage of not being connected to any one game and consequently could embody the entire medium in a gloriously cinematic way.
Like its indestructible, wildly charismatic, two-fisted hero, Crank makes a point of going too far. It’s wildly, deliberately offensive, a movie that delights in the amorality of its hero as he gleefully transgresses the laws of man in his relentless bid to stay alive.
No film has used Statham’s brawny masculinity as brilliantly as Crank. In a career-best, career-defining performance, our anti-hero is likable, even lovable, despite being a very bad man who has to do a lot of very bad things to other very bad men to postpone or prevent a very bad end.
Statham conveys that he understands on a bone-deep, cellular level just how utterly, gloriously ridiculous every element of Crank is without winking at the audience or playing things for a joke.
In its own tacky way, Crank is a goddamn miracle, a wholly original motion picture that keeps the energy and fun cranked up to 11 from the first frame to the last.
At eight o’clock this morning I was a virgin to the magic of Crank. A few hours later I am a super-fan and it pleases me to report that Crank 2: High Voltage lives up to the seemingly impossible task of being as crazy, if not crazier, than what I can honestly say is one of the craziest fucking movies it has ever been my honor to watch and write about.
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