Reviewed by

Bud Carlson

I'm not sure I'm up for writing a review for “Crank,” it’s just too hard. It was very much a genre film. It's a movie about an adrenaline junkie, that is intended to be viewed only by adrenaline junkies.  There is a certain portion of the population that think that non-stop action films are the be-all end-all for movies, and those types will love this movie. Then there’s the rest of us who hope for a little bit more.  Those people will be tremendously disappointed by this movie.

Seems that Chev Chelios (Jason Stratham) is not a nice guy, a hit-man for the mob. A while back, one of his jobs happened to cross the Asian mob, so overnight they broke into his house and injected him with a lethal serum that will kill him if his heart rate falls below a certain level. As he learns of this, he runs around like a madman (literally) to try to find the antidote to the serum, while keeping his heart rate high enough to keep him alive.  As the movie’s writer-director Brian Taylor has said “We wanted to do a movie where a guy is moving and moving all the time. Our movie is like “Speed,” only instead of a bus, it’s a guy. If the guy slows down, he detonates, just like the bus.”

The filmmakers here seem not to be big believers in the “old fashioned elements” of what makes a movie good: storytelling, plot, logic, or characterization. Instead, they treat this half-baked storyline as though it were a music video or video game.