.: Roberts' Reviews - Movie Reviews :.

You've been injected with a deadly poison. You have just a short time to live. How will you spend your final minutes?

If you are Chev Chelios (Jason Statham), you will spend the time running around the city trying to inflict your vengeance on those responsible for your own impending demise.

There in lies the heart of the new adrenaline rush movie, Crank which sometimes plays more like a video game than in does a movie.

Statham (Transporter) plays bad guy hit man Chev Chelios who seems to have pissed off the wrong people at the wrong time, and as result of the company to which he keeps, he is injected with a Chinese cocktail that gives him only an hour to live. The only thing that will allow him to continue to function and permit him to further his violent rampage on an entire city is adrenaline. As long as he keeps stimulated and the heart is pumping at a rate that a fornicating bunny couldn't keep up with, he stands a chance of prolonging his inevitable doom.

There are three things that can essentially get the heart pumping out of one's chest. Drugs. Sex. And, as his luck would have it, Violence. Chelios then finds himself trying to stay alive by doing cocaine on a bathroom floor, having sex on a public street and chopping off hands, breaking bones and driving at increased rates of speed. All to give him just that extra time he needs to kill a thug or two (or three…or four…).

Crank is exactly what the films trailer portrays it to be. A violent, mindless, unbelievable thrill ride through the streets of a major American city. In fact, it is so violent, so mindless and so ludicrous that about ten minutes into the film you give up all hope of the movie having any redeeming qualities and you just sit back and try to be entertained for 87 minutes.

And yes, some of the entertaining was fun. A drive through a city mall was not exactly Blues Brothers quality, but it was fun. And his public affection (ahem) for his dumb-ass girlfriend played by a wasted Amy Smart was more humorous than it was awkward.

But when taken as a whole, the movie was a disappointment. The acting was sub-par and Statham needs to be given more than just a rehashing of his Transporter character. The action has all been done before and in better movies, and herein lies the problem with Crank. Had the movie not taken itself seriously, it might have been a guilty pleasure. But by trying to walk that thin line between action and action/farce, it just failed to keep any momentum