Film critics like to write things like "Action packed! A rip-roaring good time! Adrenaline-soaked fun!" I'm not very good at it; I have a mild disposition. However, if I did use such supercharged superlatives, I'd use them to describe Crank, the most fun I've had at the movies all year. It's like a live-action, R-rated Looney Tunes cartoon directed by Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie's bastard love child. In style and attention span, it resembles the recent films of Tony Scott, who relies on weed-whacker editing, hypersaturated colors, and leaps of illogic, but there's a difference here: the story supplies a reason for the artifice, which is lacking in Scott's films.

Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) is a hitman who wakes up to find that he's been dosed with a synthetic poison—a "Beijing cocktail," he's told as if that explains anything—by a mid-level gangster named Verona (Jose Pablo Cantillo) who's upset that Chelios killed a Chinese gangster (don't worry—there's an explanation for how everyone relates to each other, but it's really not the point). Chelios has an hour or two before the drug kills him; he can prolong his life by charging himself on adrenaline or its over-the-counter substitutes (the film is largely an advertisement for energy drinks), but in the end his heart will stop. Chelios, not wanting to go gently into that good night, rages, rages against the entire city of Los Angeles, hoping to kill everyone who has wronged him, or perhaps everyone who knows anyone who has wronged him, before he dies. And that's the entire plot; we learn it in the first five minutes, like we've dropped a quarter into a pinball machine, and the rest is just Chelios bouncing around the inside of the machine.

Jason Statham proves that he has what it takes to become the next big action star (although his next film is a video game adaptation for Uwe Boll, which might put the hex on him). He's got the chiseled good looks and the athletic build, but more importantly he has a great screen presence—all icy cool and deadpan, but with an underlying sensitivity and deft comic ability. That hint of tongue-in-cheek humor that was visible around the edges of the first Transporter film is on full display here, as is a bit of self-ribbing about the patently silly action scenes from that franchise. In those films, Statham's character was an expert driver of snazzy automobiles; it can't be an accident when he ends up bare-assed on a police motorcycle in this film.

Most films that rely on 100% action wind down by the end; we're exhausted from all of that stimulation, and the comedown usually happens long before the end credits start to roll. Amazingly, though, Crank never runs out of steam. Part of the reason is that interspersed among the action scenes are a number of side-splittingly funny moments. Chelios's interactions with his naive girlfriend Eve (Amy Smart, delivering one of the best comedic performances in recent months) and his repeated phone calls to his disreputable doctor (played brilliantly by Dwight Yoakam) reduced me to helpless laughter. Other scenes rely on pure disbelief-be-damned cinematic brio: former commercial directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor throw every technique they can think of, and several that feel like accidents, at the screen, employing split-screens, handheld cameras, slow-motion, Frank Tashlin-style visual gags, and animation (among others). It should probably become exhausting, but it doesn't.

—October 2, 2006