DVD: Crank

Crank is quite literally 78 minutes of non-stop adrenaline pumping action, with a few minutes of credits tagged on the end. Jason Statham wakes to find he has been injected with a "Beijing Cocktail" that will kill him within the hour. The only way to postpone death is to keep adrenaline flowing through his veins. He decides that two things need to happen before he dies. He must say goodbye to his girl and kill the man who injected him.

Most action films have a pretense of depth about them with directors trying to show they are the new Tarrantino or choreograph their action scenes as if they are balletic high art. Thankfully in this regard Crank is like a child overdosing on Red Bull who has just come off a big rollercoaster, it follows one set piece with another with hardly a pause for breath. Mexican stand-offs are eschewed as they are simply too darn slow. The film veers so much into the absurd that you start to forget what normality looks like and pulls a range of stunts that seem to have come straight out of the Jackass handbook.

Statham seems to have been tailor made with films like this in mind. His wired, pissed off expression doesn't crack for the entire film and there is occasionally time for a nice few one liners. The film is a cheap, trashy, vacuous B movie that solely wants to hold your attention for every minute of it's brief running time. If only there were more films like it.