I meant to write this about a month ago when Hobbs and Shaw was released, but I thought of that film as a good opportunity to reconnect with my once-favorite Jason Statham vehicles, and the ones most transparently aware that they are vehicles for a character called “Jason Statham”.
Crank
The protagonist of Crank is a hitman, a killer for hire. In one thoroughly offhand moment, never referenced again, he admits this to his girlfriend, exposing his bullshit claim about being a video game programmer to her. This feels like a smiling admission of guilt on the filmmakers’ part, the film’s winking Rosetta Stone, or maybe its cheat-code: this really is a video game, and perhaps video games have some relationship with societal violence, or maybe blaming video games is merely a ruse, a distraction from the hard work of exposing real violence in society at the political level. Writer-director Neveldine and Taylor’s response, collectively, is a proud “we don’t care, we’re making our film anyway”.
I’ll be the first to say that I really don’t know what to make of that morally, except that the impishly amoral Crank is Neveldine and Taylor’s attempt to tease out the aesthetic essence of video game filmmaking much more eloquently than any formal video game adaptation ever has. When that aforementioned protagonist, Chev Chelios (Jason Statham), fails to fulfill one particular hit, he is immediately targeted for extermination, and the rest of the film is transparently a series of levels and trials haphazardly disconnected by narrative fragments that only register as real at the most abstract level.
In point of fact, Crank’s first subversion of the time-honored cinematic trope of the hitman being hunted for failing to kill a target is that Chev has already been killed before the film begins, poisoned and left for dead: Crank, in other words, has no business with formalities, no time to waste. When he is informed that he can delay the effects of the poison seeping into his heart by keeping his adrenaline up by any means necessary, he proceeds to try to hunt down the killers in the most direct manner possible, his life depending on it. It feels like a high-concept joke: a thoroughly immoral action film that is, in an entirely ironic way and without any emotion, all-“heart”, a mockery of the fact that we expect this film to make any excuses for itself, to have any character or soul. We aren’t interested in salvaging his soul, but in keeping what amounts to one of those video game heart icons from filling up with poison, symbolizing a player character’s demise. Continue reading