Studio: Lionsgate, Lakeshore Entertainment

Rating: 3/5

Crank is a 90-minute long excuse to do weird camera tricks. Writer/Director duo Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor are both director of photographers who wanted to try out some stuff and sold their movie. There's not much plot nor much in the way of characters but there is a lot of action.

The basic story is that hit man Chev (Jason Statham) was injected with a Chinese drug by Verona (Jose Pablo Cantillo). The drug will kill him unless he can keep his adrenaline up and to do that he goes to great lengths throughout the film as he looks for Verona for some payback.

Meanwhile he has a girlfriend, Eve (Amy Smart), to protect. She doesn't know about his real profession and doesn't believe him when he tells her. But soon he's dragging her along because she becomes a target too.

There is a lot of shooting and insane violence. Chev is good enough not to go around killing innocent people nor police officers and confines his killings to various gang members trying to stop him. The violence is rather gory at times with a hand getting cut off and fingers blown off.

The cinematography is very jerky. Lots of handheld. Lots of split screens. Lots of speeding up/slowing down film and color effects. It's almost a real-time movie but not very noticeably which is good since most real-time movies kind of suck.

Overall I didn't really like the camera work and the special effects. Once you take that out there's not much of a film left. But Statham and Smart do pull the movie up for the three stars. He's able to keep the character nasty and dangerous yet sympathetic enough to root for. She just looks good and plays the clueless but not naive girlfriend well.

Dave liked this movie. Personally I don't think there's enough there to really recommend.

Disk 1 Extras

Crank'd Out Mode - Commentary track with picture-in-picture so you can see who'st talking. Mostly Neveldine/Taylor with about half various actors and production people.

Crank: Family Friendly Audio - A cleaner alternate audio track.

Music Video - David Rolas "Adrenalina"

Disk 2 Extras

More With...

-- Neveldine/Taylor (8 min)

-- Jason Statham (6 min)

-- Efren Ramirez (4 min)

-- Adam Biddle (4 min)

-- Jose Cantillo (2 min)