Crank
2006 · Directed by Brian Taylor, Mark Neveldine
Original language: English
- action
- thriller
- crime
The story
Chev Chelios, a hit man wanting to go straight, lets his latest target slip away. Then he awakes the next morning to a phone call that informs him he has been poisoned and has only an hour to live unless he keeps adrenaline coursing through his body while he searches for an antidote.
What it’s like
Jittery handheld camera and saturated, overcranked neon: Los Angeles at night smears into streaks of sodium orange, hot pink and electric blue, while the picture jumps, zooms and tilts with a restless, video-game energy. The sound is a loud, thumping electronic score cut through with sudden silences, gunfire cracks and the flat slap of fists, and the sequences rarely hold still long enough to let you settle. Its vibe is frantic, sweaty and deliberately absurd, closer to a sugar rush than a cozy night in, suited to a loud Friday with friends or a late-night session when you want to be jolted rather than soothed. The pace never lets up and the tone stays deadpan-comic, with a lone, lovable antihero scrambling to stay alive and loosely drawn figures around him. Violence is frequent, bloody and cartoonishly brutal, with plenty of gunfire, beatings and crude sexual content and drug use; it lands as over-the-top comedy rather than dread. Not for anyone seeking gentleness. For viewers who love kinetic, nihilistic action and dark humour, and who enjoy a film that treats its own excess as a joke.
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