film | Man behaving badly

Imagine Speed with the bus replaced by, oh, a human body, and you've got CRANK, a relentlessly busy action-thriller in which a bad guy zig-zags through Los Angeles to find — and kill, natch — the even-badder guys who jabbed him with a hypodermic needle full of some mystery drug that'll seize his heart if he doesn't keep his adrenaline thumping at 101 percent throttle. Of course, I briefly wondered: If the even-badder guys want him dead and got within pricking distance, why didn't they just shoot him in the face and get it over with already? And I'm sorry, but the mere knowledge that there's an arrhythmic timebomb inside your ribcage should be enough to stress you into the kind of physical buzz you'd have to ingest a week's worth of caffiene drips to otherwise achieve, right? So why does Chev Chelios (Jason Statham), Crank's anti-hero hit man, need to engage in all sorts of reckless behavior — inciting racial tension, snorting coke off the floor of a strip club bathroom, screwing his girlfriend (Amy Smart of Road Trip) on a bustling city sidewalk — to keep the beat from slowing to the lulled tempo of a Sunday siesta? Cuz, um, I know I'd be buggin' out, like, the whole damn time. Chev, apparently, has a more blasé attitude regarding his impending demise.

If you think Crank sounds extreme, well, co-writers/directors Brian Taylor and Mark Neveldine would probably respond with a high-five and a "hell yeah!"; their movie is hungrily, proudly gratuitous, which really doesn't excuse its rampant stupidity — or its questionable portrayal of women as rap-video hoochies and daft exhibitionist cheerleaders — as much as it enables farcical broad strokes all around. (It's not as though the men, the lot of them skeezy hoodlums, fare better.) This rampant, turbo-charged ridiculousness is a cracked-out boon for Crank's first 40 minutes — it's wildly funny when Statham eludes a police chase by turning the mall into a giant drive-thru — and then ... well, perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that too much of too much is an exhausting thing, and the movie morphs into a glib cartoon headache that won't let up until the inevitable final moments. You might need a nap and a couple Advil as the end credits roll, but hey, it could be worse: You could be Chev Chelios. C