Crank: High Voltage is surely the most visually inventive picture of the year. It is not just candy for your eyes, it is amphetamines. It is among the best times I’ve had at the movies in the past few years.
A director usually focuses on one or two typical movie elements to the detriment of the others, which is why you so often see a dull picture filled with intense acting, or a blockbuster story with throwaway characters. The most common of all permutations is action ueber alles in which car chases follow bar fights follow gunplay follows airplane battles follow robot wars. But the rarest is one in which the director finds a string of absolutely original things to do for nearly every minute of the movie. That’s what happens in Crank: High Voltage, and that’s what makes it so exciting.
Start with the look of the picture. When you first see it, you can’t quite put your finger on why it looks different, but pay close attention: the motion has a stutter. When people and objects move quickly in a typical film, they smear. In this picture, fast motion looks more like a series of stop-action photos flipped past very quickly. (Turns out this is achieved using a “narrow shutter angle”–simply put, each frame is exposed for less time than in a typical shoot, so there’s less motion to record.) Combined with modest overexposure (overexposed for light but underexposed for motion–hmm), the effect is hyper-reality: sharp edges, crisp foregrounds, rough textures. This in turn is amplified by something I didn’t notice until I saw the picture a second time, that directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (working as Neveldine/Taylor) use well-timed sound effects to emphasize the action.
A description doesn’t do justice to the effect, which changes the look of both action and relatively static shots. The beauty is that you don’t have to analyze it or even notice it to feel it.
The attitude Neveldine/Taylor has about how they shoot extends to what they shoot. The movie gives way at several points to a hilariously profane newscast, an educational film strip, a Jerry Spinger-style talk show, a guide to locations via Google maps, and a papier-mache-and-rubber-mask homage to Godzilla movies. There are nods to other pictures, too, including a direct mention of the Die Hard series and a box with gold-glowing contents (which acknowledges either Pulp Fiction or Kiss Me Deadly, depending on how far back you care to go). The violence is graphic, constant, bloody and close-up, and sometimes the results fly out to land literally on the lens. There’s sex, and it’s played for laughs as spectator sport, and carried out at the same frenetic pace as the rest of the picture–but there’s always dissonance, and in this extended scene it comes from the wonderfully inappropriate soundtrack music.
Crank: High Voltage is titillating and vulgar and exhausting and exhilarating and absolutely fantastic. It’s going to be way too much for many viewers, and I guess that’s fine. But to miss out on this is to miss out on a rare and great exploitation of what can be done only with film–and a couple smart, twisted minds. I love this movie.
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