Crank
February 2007 Reviewed by: Rad Bennett Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Crank was a sleeper, one of the surprise hits of 2006. It probably won’t win any Oscars, but if there were a category for "most enjoyable of the year," it would surely receive my nomination. Exactly because it is derivative across the board, it came off as one of the most original movies of last year.

Here’s the setup: Gang employee Chev Chelios (Jason Stratham) staggers to consciousness one morning and finds a videodisc taped to his video monitor. He finds it is a message from gang punk Verona (Jose Pablo Cantillo). It seems he was knocked out the night before and, while unconscious, injected with a "Beijing Cocktail," a poison that will render him dead in an hour. Chelios is enraged and sets off on a journey of mayhem and madness to find his killer and eliminate him. By cell phone he learns from his wacky doc (Dwight Yoakam) that he has to keep pumping adrenaline or he will slow down and die.

His path across town involves various shoot-outs, a high speed chase that ends up in a mall where the destroyed car is taken away on the up escalator, and a rapid chase through a hospital where Chev has gone to find meds that will keep him awake. At midpoint, we find out that Crank is really a black comedy and that by playing it straight, Stratham has done the comedy performance of a lifetime! You can read my review of the film to find out more about the movie itself.

The single-disc DVD contains splendid transfers. The picture is sharp and clear when it needs to be. I say it that way because the directors use every trick in the cinematic book to pull off this movie -- slow motion, fast motion, jump cuts, split screens, subtitles, freeze frames, shifts to black and white, jerky hand-held camera, cut-away animations of internal organs. Some scenes are meant to look slick, others to look gritty. The DVD makes all the switching look intentional, not accidental. There’s one close up of a pigeon that will show you just how sharp this picture really is.

The soundtrack is mostly loud yet entirely clean and clear. Paul Haslinger’s pulsing score and well-chosen source music combine to push this movie along at breakneck pace, and the music sounds right-on. There’s lots of punchy bass, with highs and mids that have good presence.

The extras are a little strange. One is a commentary by the two directors, which is done in the style we have come to expect on HD DVD and BR releases. There is the picture in picture, which pops up at different places on the screen. Sometimes it’s a head shot of someone talking, at other times a behind-the-scenes "how they did it" picture. The only difference between this and an HD experience is that you can’t zoom in and out at will. It’s very interesting to watch, and it provides a lot of information along with a lot of fun.

Then there’s something called "Family Friendly Audio." Click this and you can watch the movie without expletives. It works smoothly, but why, you might ask, use it for this film? Anyone who can take all the blood, violence, and sex jokes could surely stand to hear the "f" word now and then. Still, it is there if you want to show the movie to your visiting grandma. And who knows? It is so different that even she might find it refreshing.

Crank is also being released in a Blu-ray edition.

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