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CS
Weekly Archive > Weekend Read > 09/01/06
Crap
By den shewman
Crank
Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor (also co-directors)
Crank is a film that cries out for a company to immediately buy the remake rights and re-do this fantastic premise right. Talk about the perfect high concept: Speed meets D.O.A. -- a man's been poisoned, and the only way he can stay alive is to keep the adrenalin pumping to slow the toxin's attack on his bloodstream. He slows, he dies. If only the execution wasn't generic Guy Ritchie wannabe-gangster-flick, this could have been a minor classic. Your first clue that Crank's co-writers and co-directors, writing/VFX/DPs Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, don't know the gold they're sitting on is when you discover that our victim is a hitman. Shades of Tarantino! (And there are many, many knock-off shades of Tarantino here.). Bad boy Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) spends his last few hours tracking down the gangster (Jose Pablo Cantilla) who did this to him, theoretically to recover the antidote but mainly just to kill him. For all the script's faux cleverness, the action is seen-it-before-and-better, there's far too little character-based drama or humor, and the characters themselves are either boring or flat-out caricatures (like the mincing Kaylo, played by Efren Ramizrez). The only real heartbeat appears in the form of Chev's girlfriend Eve (Amy Smart), who shows up for far too little screen time in the last act. But the thinks-it's-too-clever-by-half ending shows that these writers are a decade late, and don't quite grasp what makes a story's conclusion more than just an ending.
Crank
Lionsgate Films
Rated R; 83 min.
Buy tickets now
Den Shewman wrote a script review for Creative Screenwriting five years ago, and somehow ended up as editor-in-chief of Creative Screenwriting Magazine and CS Weekly. Yet he co-wrote an episode of The New Adventures of Robin Hood (which, according to the producers, was the #2 show in France at the time) and never ended up as executive producer of Maid Marian: Bring It On. More proof that life is not fair..
Crank courtesy Lionsgate Films
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