31-03-2025
‘If you stop, you die': Inside Crank, the action masterpiece that super-charged Jason Statham
Jason Statham didn't know he was funny until he made Crank, the 2006 action film about a hitman who – after being poisoned by gangsters – must keep his adrenaline up to stay alive.
Statham had made his name in Guy Ritchie's geezer films, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000), becoming a semi-recognisable face in macho-leaning films such as Mean Machine (2001), The Italian Job (2003) and The Transporter (2002).
But the British model-turned-actor didn't think he had the specific chops for Crank. 'We thought it worked great for Jason,' says Mark Neveldine, the film's co-writer and director. 'But when we met him, he was like, 'I'm not funny guys.' We said, 'You are funny, we watched Lock, Stock and Snatch – you're hilarious.' He just didn't realise it.' Once he got into the script and saw our shooting style, he said, 'OK, let's give it a shot.''
Crank is wilfully, gloriously, deliciously insane stuff. Between action sequences that see Statham drive a car sideways up a shopping mall escalator and dance on the back of a stolen police bike to the sound of Harry Nilsson's Everybody's Talkin' (wearing a bare-bottomed hospital gown, no less) he shoots someone using their own severed hand, accidentally murders a budgerigar, and has sex in front in a very receptive crowd in Chinatown.
Almost 20 years on, Statham – 'The Stath' – is a nails-hard national treasure and back in cinemas with A Working Man, directed by David Ayer, which continues the lineage of Statham as a lone hero taking on a consortium of baddies and has thoroughly wiped the floor with Snow White at the worldwide box office.
But it was Crank – followed by the even nuttier, bad-taste sequel, Crank: High Voltage, released three years later – that made Statham a semi-ironic, self-aware action star. But one absolutely committed to the authentic thrills of pulse-ratcheting punch-ups and stunts.
Neveldine, who made Crank with then-regular filmmaking partner Brian Taylor, laughs at how knowingly barmy their debut film was. 'We weren't out to make an art piece. This was a scream for attention from me and Brian,' he says. 'We wanted to make a parody of an action film that works. It was, 'How crazy can we go? How far can we push the limit?''
Then in their 30s, Neveldine and Taylor were maverick filmmakers who worked in commercials – 'I was shooting stuff on roller blades!' Neveldine says – and decided they should write a film that had to be constantly moving. They jotted down ideas on a napkin while they were in a bar one evening and bounced ideas around until they finally sat down to write the script.
'We wrote that thing in three-and-a-half days,' says Neveldine. 'We knocked it out.'
It's perhaps the first action film, other than The Matrix (1999), that tried to feel like a video game come-to-life – though Crank's story is also a parodic play on another Keanu Reeves actioner, Speed (1994), the ultimate in high-concept action premises. Yet instead of a bus that explodes if it slows down, it's a man.
Neveldine adds: 'We kind of realised we were both ADHD and to capture the audiences' attention we wanted to do things raw – faster with more quick cuts – and make it a little bit like a video game. We knew if we could create a movie that was like a shot of adrenaline, that would resonate with the audience.'
It begins when Statham's hitman – the brilliantly named Chev Chelios – wakes up to discover he's been injected with a lethal Chinese drug that slows down the heart. As explained by his shady doctor (Dwight Yoakam), Chev must keep the adrenaline pumping to prevent his heart from stopping altogether. 'If you stop, you die,' explains the doctor.
To keep the adrenaline going, Chelios sniffs cocaine and nasal sprays, robs a hospital of adrenaline meds, gives himself a defibrillator blast, rampages around the city with arguably the funniest erection in film history, and sticks his hand in a waffle iron.
Another sequence, in which he goes into a DIY store and hammers nails into his legs, proved too much and had to be cut.
'The way that Brian and I worked was Brian would write a scene to make me laugh, then I'd write a scene to make Brian laugh,' says Neveldine. 'We kept pushing it further and further but at the same time we were like, 'This is a real hitman. If he's in a certain situation, what's the one thing he can do in that moment to stay alive?' If he's near a hardware store, that's the only thing he can do! He's got to pump his adrenaline. Or he's got to have sex in Chinatown in public. There was a method to our madness.'
The Chinatown sex scene – between Chelios and girlfriend Eve (Amy Smart) – is the film's best remembered sequence. Chev's heart is about to give out, so he hastily seduces Amy as a last-ditch effort to keep the adrenaline going (cue Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On, naturally).
As ridiculous as the shooting scenario sounds – The Stath simulating sex in front of dozens of extras, including a coachload of screaming girls – all Neveldine remembers is needing to get the scene shot.
'When the bus showed up with all these people we were just laughing,' he says. 'But there's no time in that moment to do anything except roll the camera. We just shot the thing. It was just, we've got a lot of people here, we've got to get this thing done!'
The whole of Crank was made with a freewheeling, renegade spirit. Shooting on digital, Neveldine and Taylor operated the cameras themselves and followed the action at high speed. 'Brian would be hanging out of a car, I would be on roller blades, and Jason would be jumping off a motorcycle,' Neveldine says. 'We kept feeding off this insane energy.'
'They have this great freestyle way of shooting things,' said Statham at the time. 'Using this new generation of HD camera equipment allows them – because the cameras are so small – to get into places you'd never think of putting a camera. I'm driving along and they're sticking a camera between my legs. It's just so freeform. I've never seen anything like it.'
Statham wasn't afraid to muck in with action sequences. With a background in competitive diving and martial arts, his manly credentials were legit.
'We didn't have to use doubles, we just used Jason,' adds Neveldine. 'Because we didn't have much money – which helped because the studio wasn't on our back – we were able to make it up as we went along. We didn't have time to stick in stunt doubles. We had a great stunt coordinator who choreographed some stuff with his guy. We looked at what they'd done, and Jason went, 'Oh, I'll do it.' We just jumped in and shot it. Generally, it was a one-take or two-take thing. Then it was off to the next set-piece.'
Indeed, Statham was – as Neveldine describes – 'a total beast'. In the film's climactic sequence – a punch-up on a helicopter – he dangled from a wire above Los Angeles. But The Stath wasn't alone. Also hanging up there on wires and harnesses – at a truly adrenaline-cranking 3,000ft – were Jose Pablo Cantillo, playing the villain Verona, and Neveldine himself with the camera.
'It was a pilot and me and those two guys,' says Neveldine. 'We were just doing our best to make it seem real. I think they were both terrified, which was great. You can kind of see that in Jose's face. Jason might not have been terrified… Mainly, he wants to make sure everything's safe before he does it. Then he's gung ho.'
Because of the ferocity of the fight, Statham was connected to two different wires. When his character ultimately falls from the chopper, Statham actually let go and dropped on a descender rig.
'Yeah, that was a big stunt,' said Statham, 'I mean, how do you prepare for hanging 3,000ft out of the side of a helicopter? You don't. I've never done it before. You just get strapped in and away you go... But I like to do all my own stuff and I feel pretty confident doing so. Otherwise, I wouldn't put my silly self in that position.'
Released on September 1, 2006, Crank was a modest success in cinemas – but it became a hit on DVD. And it holds up: The Telegraph still ranks Crank as one the 20 greatest action films ever made.
Neveldine and Taylor didn't want to make a sequel but the studio was keen. The duo wrote a screenplay, assuming it would be a cheap follow-up directed by someone else.
'When we finished the script, we were laughing so hard,' Neveldine recalls. 'We were both like, 'We probably have to do this, right? This is insane.' When Jason read it, he was like, 'Let's go.' Once we knocked that script out, we were compelled to do it.'
There was one problem: Chelios dies at the end of the first film, quite definitively, by plummeting to the ground from that helicopter. But the sequel is appropriately, well, cranked up and doesn't miss a beat. It begins with gangsters scooping Chelios's body off the ground. He later awakes to find they've removed his heart and replaced it with an artificial ticker. This time around he needs jolts of electricity to keep the heart working – the kind you get from clamping jump leads to your nipples and tongue, for example.
Though the sequel, released in 2009, wasn't as well received by everyone – it earned a dismal one star from The Telegraph – it's a self-aware parody of a film that was already a self-aware parody. Statham jams a shotgun up a villain's backside ('You've found me in quite an unpleasant mood this morning, mate') and whispers threats to a severed, cryogenically preserved head.
'We wrote it for ourselves,' says Neveldine. 'We're not even sure that the studio ever read Crank 2. They had so much success from the first DVD that they were just excited that the three of us wanted to do another one. I'm almost positive that Lionsgate [the distributor] didn't read the script, because how would they let that go into production? We might have just hit the era when they were into the vulgar auteur sh–t.'
For Statham, it ultimately led to mainstream action fare such as The Expendables and the Fast and the Furious series, while his one-man-on-a-mission films continue with the likes of The Beekeeper and now A Working Man. In the spirit of Crank, Statham's often at his best with that sense of knowing self-parody (for instance, Statham vs. a giant shark in The Meg). Other actioners came in its wake with the air of being so ridiculous you can't not enjoy them – see Liam Neeson in Taken and his rebirth as a creaky-kneed geri-action man – while its frenetic, technical innovation became standard for ballsy, blood-pumping action, as seen in The Raid (2011) and John Wick (2014).
There were talks about Crank 3 and a pilot for a potential TV series was made several years ago. Neveldine insists they'd be ready to go if the TV series ever gets the greenlight. And they wouldn't be short of ideas. There are whole Reddit threads dedicated to what Crank 3 could be about – 'In Crank 3, Chev Chelios has to constantly (insert blank) to stay alive', posits one thread. Suggestions include 'stay on fire', 'not blink', 'only speak in rhyme', and 'remain calm'.
Neveldine jokes that they'd have to play against expectations in a third film. 'We'd have to go against all that and make a very simple My Dinner with Andre style romantic murder mystery,' he says.
But in almost three decades of Jason Statham on screen, the original Crank is still a tough one to beat – the film that super-charged The Stath.
