Crank exists in a weird kind of limbo, at the moment. It was a movie that came out in 2006, and so it’s potentially old enough to start feeling nostalgic, but also maybe not quite. This is based more on nostalgia from the 1980s really peaking in the 2010s, and maybe also in the sense that something has to be at least a quarter of a century old before it can be deemed a classic… though that’s more a vibe, and an estimate. There’s no agreed-upon amount of time, and the idea of a nostalgia cycle is also kind of up for debate. Anyway, Crank obviously isn’t new enough to be an exciting/truly modern release, and is not really old enough to be a traditional classic, and it’s also probably not quite good enough to be a classic anyway, even if it were old enough. It’s got no interest in being a traditional classic, though. It’s a movie with an incredible and ridiculous premise, seeing as it involves a man who gets poisoned with a strange drug that requires him to keep adrenaline pumping through his body if he wants to stay alive.

So, he does a series of alarming things to keep adrenaline high while trying to find someone who might have an antidote, and that quest also involves getting revenge on the people who injected him with the drug in the first place. It’s got a perfectly-cast Jason Statham rampaging his way around, looking very angry, and somehow balancing being sort of cool, more than a little silly, and then very slightly funny in a self-aware kind of way, all at once. Crank has excuses to get extreme with its content, given what the protagonist is required to do throughout, and many opportunities to do something crude, violent, or profane (or all of the above) are taken. Crank is, however, topped in its extremeness by a few other noteworthy action movies from cinema history, including a very obvious pick (the sequel, which will be gotten to and elaborated on shortly), one other movie that came out about a decade after the Crank films, and then a film that came out more than 20 years before the first Crank. If you’ve seen this Jason Statham movie and want something that might scratch the same itch – and, beyond that, actually scratch that itch even harder – then the following titles are very much worth watching.

3

‘Crank: High Voltage’ (2009)

Image via Lionsgate

Turns out you can’t kill Chev Chelios, the main character of Crank, even if that 2006 movie did appear to show him dying at the end. You’d expect as much, given how long he was falling for, before he hit the ground, in Crank (2006), but the sequel, Crank: High Voltage, sets an early precedent for being much more gonzo by merely existing. He’s brought back to life, and has his heart stolen and then replaced with an artificial one, and then he sets off on another wild mission to get his heart back, all the while continually electrocuting himself because that’s the only thing that’ll keep his artificial heart going. More disbelief must be suspended than was necessary in the already outlandish first Crank, as Crank: High Voltage really does feel like it wants to be more ridiculous, crass, and over-the-top in just about every way. In terms of escalating things to ludicrous new heights, you do kind of have to admire it. Anything goes, or even beyond that, maybe too much goes here, in a way.

The dark sense of humor found in much of the first movie is a lot broader here, so even if the humor might seem darker, it’s all pushed to an extreme to a point where Crank: High Voltage feels much more like an outright comedy. It’s also very much offensive, and felt so back in 2009, just feeling a little more extreme by today’s standards. Not that certain places this movie goes were necessarily acceptable back then, but you probably couldn’t get away with making a film starring Jason Statham with this kind of content depicted in this sort of way today, and whether that makes the film more worthy of being “cherished” or not is entirely subjective. It’s a time capsule of the 2000s, in like a heightened way that felt almost like an ahead-of-its-time parody, and it feels that way arguably more than Crank (2006). As to the specific things that happen here, it would go beyond the bounds of what’s typically acceptable to write in an article if they were elaborated on too much here. There are a lot of crude sexual scenes, the violence is all very gruesome (and near-constant), Jason Statham swears persistently (at least he’s very good at it), and the film’s screenplay seeks to make fun of – and possibly offend – pretty much everyone. It’s exhausting, and yet that’s sort of the point, so it’s a “just take it or leave it” kind of situation.

2

‘The Night Comes for Us’ (2018)

Probably the least potentially offensive movie of all the ones being mentioned here (including the original Crank), The Night Comes for Us instead earns its spot among the most extreme action movies of all time for just how violent that action is. It’s easy, and also a little fun, to compare this to The Raid and The Raid 2, especially because the film’s stars, Joe Taslim, Iko Uwais, and Julie Estelle, all had roles in at least one of those martial arts movies. The Night Comes for Us isn’t quite as graceful as a martial arts movie, nor is the fight choreography as good as much of what you’ll find in both The Raid and The Raid 2, but it carves its own identity, in a way, by having many people get carved up, thrown around, and generally brutalized. It’s like a slasher movie, but instead of a lone killer going around and killing people in elaborate ways, there are a handful of prominent characters who can all cause the kind of damage slasher villains do, and they go up against each other sometimes, or they take on thoroughly outmatched henchmen (and henchladies… “henchpeople?”).

That’s a lot of rambling about The Night Comes for Us without mentioning its plot, but also, what plot? This is sort of about an ex-criminal trying to redeem himself by saving a young girl from some dangerous people, but then those dangerous people really escalate their attempts to get the young girl, and violence keeps on escalating from that point onward. There are many moving pieces here for such a simple core narrative, and The Night Comes for Us can genuinely get sort of convoluted, with more side characters here than is really necessary, unless they’re necessary insofar as we wouldn’t get as many fight scenes if there weren’t so many people who needed to be fought. But the flimsy story being there as an excuse for action works, because the action is mostly satisfying, and, yes, memorable because of how brutal it is. It’s the sort of violence you’d expect to see in a gnarly horror movie, copied and pasted, somehow, into the framework of what might otherwise be a barebones martial arts movie. Anyway, if you like intense martial arts movies, and don’t mind some truly gruesome violence, it’s probably worth a watch.

1

‘The Boxer’s Omen’ (1983)

Image via Shaw Brothers

If the goal was to make a movie that’s genuinely impossible to watch while eating, then The Boxer’s Omen is a rousing success, and maybe even a full-blown masterpiece. There are some of the most disgusting sights here you’ll ever see in a movie, especially an action movie, although The Boxer’s Omen is also a horror film, so the gross-out stuff makes a little more sense when you take that into account. The more you try to say about what happens in this movie, narratively speaking, the more confusing it’ll sound, but to have a stab at doing that, this is sort of about the brother of a boxer who wants to avenge him after a terrible injury suffered in the ring. Revenge in a martial arts movie is often to be expected, but then things go off the deep end before too long, and The Boxer’s Omen introduces some pretty extreme supernatural elements, and from there, things get progressively nastier.

It’s a gross-out martial arts horror movie, and there aren’t too many of them, and if there were, it’s very likely that none would be able to compete with The Boxer’s Omen in terms of extremity. Almost anything violent that could happen to someone probably will happen to someone at some point in this film, and there are all sorts of scenes with dead things, body parts, and animals that are also nauseating. It’s just non-stop. It is, like the Crank movies, overwhelming, and though The Night Comes for Us was also intense and extreme with its violence, The Boxer’s Omen exceeds it in shock value because of its horror elements, and also because it’s unapologetically sexually charged at points, too. You get a real smorgasbord of things to be surprised – and possibly grossed out by – here, and it does have to be stressed, once more, that this really is a one-of-a-kind sort of film.

The Boxer’s Omen

Release Date

October 23, 1983

Runtime

105 minutes

Director

Kuei Chih-Hung

Writers

Kuei Chih-Hung, Sze-To On

• 

• 

  Wai Ka-Man

  Chan Hung’s Girl

• 

  Johnny Wang Lung-Wei

  Chan Wing

•