Crank I with Jason Statham Options

[Marion]

With all of the press right now for Crank II - Crank High Voltage, I decided to see Crank I.

First off, I've been a big fan of Jason Statham since Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. I personally think it is hard to make a bad movie with Jason in it. Also,

I remember seeing some of the ads for Crank I when it was in the theaters and, the movie just didn't seem like something I would enjoy even with Jason in it. Well,

I have to say that while Crank I is interesting and there are some great scenes in the movie, overall, Crank I didn't do it for me. Now,

Since there is a Crank II, obviously a lot of people must have enjoyed Crank I and Crank I must have done some pretty good box office.

There is a lot of good intentions in Crank I and, I suppose, in a movie theater, surrounded by a lot of other people who want to be entertained, it would probably be easy to just go with the flow of Crank I's good intentions. However, from where I sat,

There were a lot more good intentions in Crank I than accomplishments. A lot of the music in Crank really didn't work (like, "Acky Breaky Heart" and, "The Theme from Midnight Cowboy). And, some of the "outrageous scenes" in Crank I have been done in other movies. For example,

1. There is a scene in Crank where Jason picks up a severed hand that is "gripped" to a gun and he uses the gun with the finger of the severed hand still on the trigger. Well, this scene looks a lot like a scene Benicio Del Toro did in a movie where Benicio's hand is off while it is pointing a guy.

2. A scene in Crank in which Jason Statham steps out of his car after a car chase / gun battle with bad guys and Jason walks over to the car of bad guys (who are probably already dead) and empties his gun into the window of the car. George Clooney does a similar scene in the movie The Peacemaker.

[i]The "gist" of Crank is that Jason Statham's character is poisoned by a rival mobster with a drug and the only way Jason can stay alive is to do things and take drugs that stipulate the flow of adrenaline in his body[/b]

BEFORE I FORGET, Jose Pablo Cantillo looks great in Crank. There are a lot of hot guys in Crank but, Jose is without question the hottest guy in Crank.

The Hidden

The movie The Hidden with Kyle MacLachlan has an adrenaline junky / thrill seeker that is into fast cars, sex and rock 'n roll. However, in The Hidden, the adrenaline Junky is an alien (from outer space) that is "crawling" into various human bodies.

IN MY OPINION, it is hard for any movie to keep a constant fast pace for two hours. Crank attempts to maintain a constant "high gear" but, again, in my opinion, the Plot of Crank just isn't sophisticated enough to make the "pacing" of Crank work.

The directors of Crank state on the DVD that their objective in creating Crank was to create a movie that showed off a style of rapid camera movement and that they wrote Crank in a very short amount of time.