Why, Mr. Statham, why?

Jason Statham has played memorable favorites in Lock Stock and Two Smoking barrels and in Snatch. Which is why it pains me to see him in films like The Transporter (either one) or this film Crank.

Crank follows Chev (Statham) who wakes up having been injected with a poison that will kill him. All he can do is put off death by keeping his adrenaline pumping. A reviewer called it a crude combination of Speed and D.O.A. which would seem to imply that either of those movies was good.

Crank is painstakingly bad. It is so painfully overstylized as they director uses split screen shots, bizarre use of flashback and scene cuts that I was boiling with rage and wanted to shout at the director to just keep the camera still and let the images tell the story but then I realized that there probably wasn't enough good footage to complete an entire film and all this ornament is simply to confuse.

This movie can't even fall onto the time tested defense of at least the action was entertaining. The action was boring. There is no sense of pacing at all. The movie wants to be serious, it isn't. It wants to be funny, it isn't. Whatever the director was attempting, he has failed on every level. He like the director of Pulse should be taken to the woods and put away quietly.