The Jason Statham Sagas

The Jason Statham Sagas

"Crank" (2006) and "The Bank Job" (2007)

(A brief note... I only watched the first twenty-five minutes of “Crank.” These are my initial thoughts, which I think would apply to the rest of its eighty-seven minute runtime.)

What are we supposed to make of a film that fully embraces its own idiocy? “Crank” starts on an unusual note, with a view of a lovely apartment flat's interior from the distorted perspective of Jason Statham, who plays a hit-man. Apparently, he has angered a Chinese mobster by murdering one of his colleagues, and said mobster has injected him with poison in his sleep. The over-theatrical mobster shows all of this on a DVD, and after watching the short video, Statham proceeds to very violently, and hilariously, pummel his poor flat-screen T.V. out of frustration. The film's premise is silly, but it is potentially entertaining: Statham is going to die, but he can keep living for a short period of time if he keeps his adrenaline levels high. How does he go about doing this? By snorting cocaine off of a floor, by driving through an indoor shopping mall while he is being pursued by cops, and by drinking lots of Red Bull.

“Crank”'s sole purpose should be to provide a lot of mindless fun, and it certainly does in the moments I cited above. But most of the time, it is a visually nauseating experience that is stupid, insultingly crude in its stereotypes, and misogynistic. The dialogue consists of nothing but variants of the words “fuck” and “cunt” - this is certainly no “Deadwood,” a T.V. show whose dialogue managed to be both incredibly profane and beautiful. We are battered with in-your-face photography and editing that resembles an M.T.V. video, and a horrendous, pounding metal score. All blacks in the film have guns and are part of a “brotherhood,” and all of the women are sluts who are slaves to their men.

So, why did I decide to stop watching “Crank?” There is a scene where Statham, being chased by the cops, hijacks a taxi by calling the understandably uncooperative driver an “Al-Qaeda member.” A bunch of old people proceed to grab a hold of the poor guy and beat him up. I was watching “Crank” with my parents, and all of us instantaneously reached for the remote at that moment. I don't know. Maybe we are hopelessly out of the loop with regards to what makes a film funny - obviously, the taxi driver deserved to be labeled a terrorist merely for refusing to help out our neanderthal of a hero. Or maybe the film is simply terrible. I'm leaning towards the latter.

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“The Bank Job” has an intriguing premise that it is based off of a true story. A member of the British Royal Family is on vacation, and while she is engaged in some torrid sex with several island natives, she is photographed by a criminal who aims to blackmail the Royal Family in order to escape prosecution. It's a strange sequence to open a film, and it's awkwardly staged, with the princess having slow-motion sex within an open-air hut. We may as well be watching a pornography video, but it's a start, I suppose.

From there, we watch as government operatives recruit a small team of incompetent robbers, led by Statham, to break into a bank, one of whose deposit boxes holds the indecent pictures of the princess. This part of the film is boring and clumsily-constructed, and it contains some disturbing similarities to “Crank.” Many of the women, at least initially, are portrayed as incompetent, or they are literally prostitutes. And again, the only blacks in the film are part of a “brotherhood,” which is led by an evil man named “Michael X,” who warns his enemies that every black person on the street will be out to kill them if they cross his path.

This film isn't much fun until we witness the actual preparations and the robbery itself, because those sequences are tightly-constructed and surprisingly suspenseful. But complications arise from the robbery, and many groups – government operatives, politicians, Michael X, and a porn king – fight for the photographs. “The Bank Job” stumbles in trying to depict how all of these narratives intersect, but everything eventually works out. One character asks Statham, “How did that happen?” to which our stoic protagonist replies, “Fucked if I know.” This brief exchange sums up the underlying belief of these two Statham films - things just happen, and whether or not we are ready to accept these contrivances is our issue, not the films'.

"Crank" First Viewed 8/2/08, on Blu-ray Disc - IMDb
"The Bank Job" First Viewed 8/2/08, on DVD - IMDb