Crank

A while back, I was in the theater and caught a preview for Crank. It looked like just another generic Hollywood action movie, so I dismissed it out of hand and figured I'd eventually catch it on DVD because I like Jason Statham. I like action movies well enough, when I'm in the mood for something utterly mindless, and I grew up on a steady diet of them in the 80s, but I don't typlically waste a lot of money on them anymore.

As it turned out, Crank was more than I expected. Last weekend, Dustin downloaded it from Xbox Live Marketplace and explained to me that he'd read a review somewhere that put the movie in a totally different light. Yes, taken solely as an action flick, Crank is all right, another in a long line of ultimately forgettable shoot-em-ups. But if you step back a moment, and look at it as a satire of the entire 80s action movie genre, it becomes a thing of beauty.

Action movies in the 80s followed a formula, particularly the revenge stories. Something is done to the main character. He starts hunting down the parties responsible. He either has a romantic interest or develops one over the course of the film. Then there's the romantic interlude and obligatory sex scene. Buddy movies replace this with some character building scenes that strengthen the friendship between hero and sidekick. Then the hero gears up for the grand finale, kills the villain, and rides off into the sunset with the girl. The details differed from movie to movie, but this is what gave us the rise of the action heros, the Schwartzeneggers, the Stalones, and so forth. Sadly, those days have passed. There are no more action heroes. There are guys who try, but no one's really making B-movie after B-movie, blowing stuff up in new and exciting ways in each. But where nostalgia for those days bring me to watch something like Crank, the sheer brilliance of the satire (intentional or not) means I cannot but enjoy it thoroughly. Crank turned out to be the very movie I always wanted to see in the 80s. It is the raw, distilled essence of the action movie. It's as if someone took the old formula script, stripped out all the unnecessary baggage and everything that slowed the movie down, and turned out a lean, mean, 87 minutes of pure, unadulterated action. I always hated the slowdown two thirds of the way through the old movies, and found myself wishing they'd cut that kid of thing out and get back to the explosions. Crank delivers on that. The major premise of the movie, that Statham's character Chev has been injected with a substance that will kill him if his heart slows too much seems to directly parallel the film-making process for an action movie. Every time things slow down for exposition or half-hearted character exploration, you can almost hear the director cry, "Oh, no! The movie's dying! Quick, someone start shooting things!" And they're off again on the next sequence. Similarly, every time Chev's not going all out to keep his heartrate up, he has the same thought and does something thoroughly insane. When a snort of cocaine doesn't do the job sufficiently, he immediately turns and attacks a bar full of huge black men just to get the adrenaline flowing. A very brief relationship interlude with his girlfriend ends with the obligatory sex scene, in the least romantic situation possible, to get his blood flowing again. For anyone in my generation, who grew up watching Arnold and Sly, Bruce and Mel, even Segal and Van Damm, Crank is a treat. It's everything we wanted from those movies, and none of the extraneous crap that slowed everything down. Non-stop action for 87 minutes. A hero who can sustain epic amounts of damage and just forgets about the injuries in the next scene. The plot is simple, the stunts operate on movie physics, and the characters are one-dimensional enough I needed to look their names up afterwards (then I decided their names were irrelevant anyway). The only change they made from the formula is the ending, and I loved that part most of all. For taking my back to my childhood, Crank gets negative 0.6 Bolls.

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