Brian Taylor
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The World , the frenetic, punk-rock direction of Crank , and the violent social commentary of The Running Man , you’d get something like the neon-soaked, morbidly comic, cleverly violent Guns Akimbo from writer/director Jason Lei Howden.
Filled with visceral violence, copious car-nage and pitch black humour (much comedy is mined from Miles' attempts to do seemingly simple tasks with his new enhancements), Guns Akimbo feels like the mutated offspring of The Running Man , Escape From New York and Edwards Scissorhands, with a side-order sensibility borrowed from Jason Statham's Crank .
Imagine a third Crank movie combined with Grand Theft Auto (or perhaps Borderlands), a handful of edgy comic books, and a bunch of old dance music and you’re halfway to understanding how insane this movie is.
Think of Crank , the action cult classic where Jason Statham plays a guy who has to keep his heart rate at a certain level, and double its intensity.
With Guns Akimbo , director Jason Lei Howden ( Deathgasm ) has made a film that feels as though it escaped from the Crank cinematic universe.
It’s like someone put Crank and Scott Pilgrim vs.
A crotch-first fusion of Rudolph Maté's D.O.A. and "Grand Theft Auto", it defines that genre of video game-inspired non-sequitur mayhem indicated by epileptic edits, CGI-aided wire-fu, and John Woo gunplay by offering a high concept (hero is dying of a rare Chinese toxin that can be held in abeyance only with a steady infusion of adrenaline) as its narrative/excuse to exist.
Short time (and as it happens, Crank is a lot like Dabney Coleman's surprisingly funny Short Time, too) inspiring sentimentality in the ol' so-and-so, Chev finds time in his mad dash to pick up dim-bulb girlfriend Eve (an unbelievably hot Amy Smart), who's of course amenable to a couple of public displays of affection.
Like a cross between "D.O.A." and "Speed" with a little bit of "Oldboy" and Michael Douglas' "Falling Down" thrown in for good measure, the directorial debut of commercial directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor is certainly not like the action movies we see every year.
Crank can’t match the sustained conceptual ingenuity of its inspirations, namely Speed and D.O.A.—hell, I’m not even sure if its makers could successfully spell D.O.A.—but the amount of stylish carnage on display generates its own cheerfully moronic slipstream.
It’s kind of like D.O.A. meets Speed, only instead of a bus it’s Statham’s one-man wrecking crew that has to keep moving.
The plot of the action/revenge-thriller "Crank" is very similar to the 1994 hit "Speed."
Their intent is an updated "Speed," with star Jason Statham ("The Transporter") replacing both Keanu Reeves and the bus.
It seems like more of a movie pitch (D.O.A. meets Speed) than a movie, but Crank gets by on a unique kind of absurd, deadpan humor in which the most implausible stuff cheerfully happens anyway.
Hardcore Henry (2015)
Directed by Ilya Naishuller
influenced by Gamer (2009), Crank (2006)
Visuals Themes
The rough-and-tumble cyborg mayhem recalls John Hyams’ Universal Soldier pictures, the final fight of hundreds of indistinguishable robot cronies is inevitably similar to a recent Paul W.S. Anderson film, and — even if not capturing their pure energy — there’s song-and-dance number featuring multiple robot clones that can’t help but make one think of a similar sequence from Neveldine/Taylor’s excellent 2009 feature Gamer .
Writer-director Ilya Naishuller is clearly most inspired by “Crank” crazies Neveldine/Taylor, so much that he even airlifts an entire musical sequence from their film “Gamer,” including the same song.
Naishuller, who developed his camera-as-mask rig while shooting music videos for his Russian alt-rock act Biting Elbows, has advanced and perfected the work of pioneers Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, whose 2009 feature Gamer starred Gerard Butler as a man whose body is controlled by a guy playing a video game.
“Hardcore Henry” is a jolt to the system and a post-modern pastiche of influences from video games (“Better Off Dead,” “Doom”) and action movies (“Gamer,” “The Raid”) that is sure to prove seminal in its own right for the way it makes its audience a plaything.
Writer-director Ilya Naishuller is clearly most inspired by “Crank” crazies Neveldine/Taylor, so much that he even airlifts an entire musical sequence from their film “Gamer,” including the same song.
It’s like Jason Statham’s Crank on speed... if that’s possible.
Instead Polar seems to take great inspiration from John Wick and the frenzied, hyper-violent work of Neveldine/Taylor in films like Crank (movies I quite enjoy) but fails to reconcile the in-your-face style it employs with the moody sensibilities of the core story, resulting in a movie that feels tonally imbalanced and confused, though it does manage to entertain and thrill from time to time.
If “John Wick” is a meaty steak, full of flavor that more than satisfies hunger pangs and “Crank” is cotton candy, sweet, tasty, but not very substantial, then Netflix‘s new action-thriller, “Polar,” directed by Jonas Åkerlund (“Spun“) and heavily indebted to both films, is what happens when you take a steak, cotton candy, and a healthy dose of your nearest narcotic and shove it all into a blender.
Director Jonas Åkerlund (Spun, Lords of Chaos) is clearly trying to evoke the same heightened, deceptively clever style and tone of Neveldine/Taylor’s Crank movies – and with the absence of a third Crank, there’s certainly an appetite for that – but without the duo’s sly stylistic brio or good taste in bad taste, this mostly comes off as desperately, self-consciously edgy.
It’s Kingsman without the know-how, Crank without the cunning, TV’s Happy! without the heart — although it tries for that, with unintentionally laughable results, during a climax that feels like a cut-rate Bourne Supremacy conclusion.
Netflix’s Polar is best described as John Wick meets Atomic Blonde meets Crank .
In that sense, and in its disembodied narration and video game screen cutaways, Boss Level channels the gonzo, surreal hedonism of the Crank films.
But Boss Level also brought back memories of the Jason Statham actioner Crank .
In Boss Level , Joe Carnahan attempts to massage the 2000s action prestigiousness of Crank and Smokin’ Aces into a Groundhog Day time-loop about marital values and Gatling guns—except it’s never that fun.
Ghost Rider (2007)
Directed by Mark Steven Johnson
influenced Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2011), Crank (2006)
Visuals
In some circles, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance has been referred to as more of a "reboot" than a "sequel," although I'm not aware of any reboots that have featured the same actor in the lead role.
Hard as it is to believe, though, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is actually worse than its predecessor.
Idris Elba, Violante Placido, and Nicolas Cage in "Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance"…
A "Ghost Rider" film directed by the lunatics who gave us the "Crank" movies promises grindhouse greatness.
The best stuntmen in this action flick are its directors, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor ("Crank," "Gamer"), who inject the movie with unrelenting violence yet never tip into gratuitous splatter -- a nifty way of retaining a PG-13 rating for their target audience.
It's clear immediately that directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor are looking to distance themselves from Mark Steven Johnson's lackluster original film, as the movie boasts precisely the sort of pervasively (and aggressively) over-the-top sense of style that one has come to expect from the Crank filmmakers.
As Lucy's body and mind are rapidly evolving, her individual cells want to fall off on their own – bits of her start flying away in the airplane washroom – and she knows she has about 24 hours to stay alive, which makes this one of those time-ticking movies like Crank or Speed .
Various moments pulsate with fragmented possibilities, alternately channeling the adrenaline-fueled “Crank” movies, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and “The Matrix,” never achieving their greatness, but capturing tidbits of its DNA.
Faltering none from its breakneck pacing and mind-opening cosmic grandiosity for a full 90 minutes, the film might best be described as a cross between 2006's adrenaline-fueled action pic " Crank " and 2011's existential Terrence Malick tone poem " The Tree of Life ."
The director just doesn’t give up, huffing and puffing away with a mad-dog determination until the film’s grand finale arrives, so overwrought, visually turgid and downright loony (like a blend of 2001: A Space Odyssey , The Tree of Life and Crank – on acid) that I questioned whether even he remembered his original intentions.
It's so stupid, often intentionally so, that it's downright brilliant, as when the stricken Chev barrels across a bridge atop a stolen LAPD motorcycle wearing nothing but some hospital johnnies and a smile while Nilsson's Midnight Cowboy theme, "Everybody's Talkin'," counterpoints the whole absurd (and absurdly entertaining) affair.
For those looking for something similar, how about the little-seen 1994 action/comedy The Chase, with Charlie Sheen and Kristy Swanson?
Kyra Sedgwick's news reporter provides trace elements of Verhoeven/ Death Race satire while Ludacris and a ludicrously dreadlocked Alison Lohman help foment the story's central anti-Big Brother fervor.
1987's "The Running Man," 2007's " The Condemned ," 2008's " Death Race ," take your pick"Gamer" adds a little twist to the machinations by rendering the competitors mere drones controlled by technology, but it is at this very conceptual level where trouble starts.
Now, I’ve told you up-front that Gamer is like the Crank pictures, so when you find out that it’s not the clone of last year’s Death Race (as Gamer’s trailer tries to make it look like), don’t complain to me.
Anyone who saw The Running Man or Death Race knows victory is an unattainable myth.
Anyone who’s seen Death Race, The Running Man or, God forbid, The Condemned knows a conspiracy is afoot.
But it says a lot about Gamer that it pales in comparison to a Jason Statham schlockfest like Death Race, especially since it's directed by Neveldine and Taylor, the duo who made Jason Statham an unlikely geek icon with the Crank movies.
For a generation of teens and twentysomethings popping Ritalin like Tic Tacs and guzzling Red Bull like mother's milk, a quaint little movie like "Run Lola Run" must feel as slow as Tarkovsky or Jarmusch.
Imagine Run Lola Run without the artsy pretension.
Marrying the concept of Rudolph Mate's 1950 noir “D.O.A.” -- remade in 1988 starring Dennis Quaid -- to the fast-moving, postmodern style of “Run Lola Run” might seem creative, but “Crank” is more irritating than inventive.
The best of the cast plays against type: Efren Ramirez (Pedro in Napoleon Dynamite ) is a flaming club kid while Dwight Yoakam ( Sling Blade ) is a sleazy mob doc.
And yet my hatred for Doyle must be viewed as a positive, because it shows what a stellar job the script, which won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, did of forging a truly detestable character, and also how great Yoakam is in the role, especially bearing in mind this was one of Yoakam’s first roles, and he’s always been better known for his music career than his acting, with this, Panic Room and the Crank movies being all I can recall him in.
Imagine if Crank writer/directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor directed a really long Key & Peele skit and you basically have Tangerine .
A reinvigorating reminder of what indie filmmaking can—and should—do, this bracingly brilliant new movie from Starlet writer-director Sean Baker (who co-wrote the script with Chris Bergoch) tells an L.A. story so florid and electric that it feels like a Pedro Almodóvar remake of Crank.
Like a cross between "D.O.A." and "Speed" with a little bit of "Oldboy" and Michael Douglas' "Falling Down" thrown in for good measure, the directorial debut of commercial directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor is certainly not like the action movies we see every year.
Finally, a movie for audiences who found Jason Statham’s “Crank” films a little too highbrow.
Even the similarly batty Crank , the debut flick by camera operators Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor , had some endearingly frayed edges to it.
Earlier films such as The Hunger Games (and its precursor, 2000’s Battle Royale), 2009’s Gamer, 1987’s The Running Man and 1975’s Rollerball reverberate – but here, the puppet master pulling the strings isn’t some overarching corporate villain.
Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)
Directed by Andy Serkis
influenced by Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2011)
Venom: Let There Be Carnage is tied with Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance as the worst movie to ever have the Marvel name attached to it.