Luckily, Irish is right on the money with Jason Statham's newest action-vehicle that did decent business in theatres, but it will go psychopathic on video. Its too rewarding for the action film buff(i.e. most heterosexual men that know better) to not do so.
CRANK isn't the right title for this movie. Of course, people would assume CRACK would be a melodramatic drug ghetto tale, but CRACK is the appropriate name, since CRANK is a movie that in its insanity and gaul that immediately begin, and doesn't pause until the end.
However, Irish should realize that what Directors/Writers Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor pulled off with only $12 million is what Michael Bay and Tony Scott tried and spectacularly fell short with their $100+ million movies. Hell, Neveldine/Taylor's cinematography and visuals remind me of when Oliver Stone was very fresh with this style, before he got self-indulgent.
Maybe why Neveldine/Taylor succeeded where Scott and Bay failed is that the duo matched the stylized narrative to a very lean, mean, simple B-action pulp story. Better yet, and this is what impressed me most, Neveldine/Taylor never once went overboard. Unlike say DOMINO, MAN ON FIRE, or DEJA VUE, I never once got sick of the visuals that get in the damn way of a story, like kidney stones or something.
Hell, I'm sure Tony Scott is crying like a little girl in his Malibu home right now, seeing that two punk kids(compared to the old fart) made a movie that will have actually mattered and made a difference for the often abused Hollywood action genre, while his shit is soon forgotten like Albert Pyun.
Certainly some sequences in CRANK, under any other director, would have totally stunk up the joint like a rotten egg. Having sex in public in Chinatown, snorting cocaine from the floor of a bathroom, making a cell phone while falling from the sky, driving through a mall so careless and unbothered(which I haven't seen this side of BLUES BROTHERS) and other stuff that seem so left field, and yet they work because of the chaos of it.
Hell, I can't wait for Neveldine/Taylor's next work. They are promising people that hopefully don't become the next Tony Scott.
