MOVIE REVIEW CRANK Rating 1 on...

MOVIE REVIEW

CRANK Rating 1 on the outside of 4

Chev Chelios . Jason Statham

edge . . . . . . . . . . . . Amy Smart

Don Kim . . . . . . Keone Young

Doc Miles . . . . Dwight Yoakam

Lions Gate nears a film written and directed by dint of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. Running time: 83 minutes. Rated R (for herculean violence, pervasive language, sexuality, nudity and physic use). Now playing at local theaters.

In "Crank," hit man Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) awakens to discover that he has been drugg with a synthetic poison from China that will kill him in "about an hour." It's a fate, he betimes learns, that can be held temporarily at bay by means of keeping his adrenaline pumping.

It's a universal perfectly suited for a movie -- single that you can almost hear being pitched to Hollywood executives. (The 1950 noir "D.O.A." is the same predecessor.) Unfortunately, Sandra Bullock isn't driving this bus.

Chelios is his have driver, keeping his foot hard onward the gas, recklessly racing to stay alive and exact vindicate by punishment on his creative killer before his heart gives not at home

Since giving up an Olympic-level career in diving, Statham has been carving abroad a niche as a minor action star, playing hardheaded British gangsters in fright Richie's "Lock, Stock and pair Smoking Barrels" and "Snatch," and more lately in "The Transporter" and its termination

In "Crank" (which wasn't sieveed in advance for critics), Statham plays an impressively offensive and unlikable character whose single-minded goal -- to stay alive lengthy enough to kill -- leads to a certain loathsome solutions.

To retain his heart rate up, Chelios (no apparent relation to the hockey star Chris) snorts cocaine opposite to a bathroom floor, guzzles R blunder picks a fight with a gun-toting gang, evades police on a car chase between the walls of a mall, has sex in the middle of Chinatown, sticks his hand in a waffle iron and -- fittingly -- headbangs to "Achy Breaky Heart."

His rampage move swiftlys through all kinds of stereotype -- a ditzy flaxen (Amy Smart) who gladly deposits out with dozens watching; a preening homosexual (Efren Ramirez) who daydreams about his previous night gone out dancing, and personality-less Chinese mobster l by way of Don Kim, played by Keone Young from HBO's "Deadwood."

While Chelios tries to figure gone out how to find Verona and whether his bos Carlito (Carlos Sanz) double-crossed him, he attempts to contact his doctor, Doc Miles (Dwight Yoakam), to find an antidote. The dependably worthy of great praise Yoakam plays Miles with a lazy helplessness. It's sole death, he conveys.

if it were not that "Crank," like Chelios, is struggleed downward by its nihilistic rush for a rush. Writer-directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor's previous work lies mainly in making commercials with the quick- cutting aesthetic exerciseed here.

Neveldine and Taylor play Chelios' manic, pointless rage for a gleefully violent sport stomping on anything and everything along the way, including the life an antiquated woman's parrot -- and the reputations of its cast.

The intelligent, gayety Smart has cheered up movies before ("Just Friends"), and Ramirez prov an estimable deadpan sidekick as Pedro in "Napoleon Dynamite." Neither necessitys stoop for a doomed hit man.

Statham remains a captivating force of efficiency on screen. But if he's going to ascend to the big leagues of action stardom, he has the talent to do it without sacrificing everything for the sake of a quick pulse

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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