Crank isn’t the movie that made Jason Statham a star, but the gleefully outrageous action movie certainly knocked him up to a different tier of stardom. He was no longer just the toff British gangster guy from the Transporter movies or the Italian Job remake, he was something a little more wild and unpredictable. Crank was quickly overshadowed a couple of years later by its zanier and bloodier sequel, Crank: High Voltage, but the original still features one of the riskiest and most dangerous stunts that Statham has ever done.

Statham mentioned the Crank stunt to Collider while promoting Guy Ritchie’s action-comedy Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. When asked about his most memorably dangerous set pieces, Statham had this to say: “I think when we shot Crank, we were hanging out of a real helicopter. A lot of the things we do now — with The Expendables — anytime you’re on a helicopter it’s usually on a green screen. But with Crank, we were actually in a helicopter.” He also added that he was standing on the skids of the helicopter during a fight scene, and it was a “real stunt” that was “pretty tricky.”

What Was Jason Statham’s Dangerous Stunt in ‘Crank’?

Image via Lionsgate

Crank, as we all know, stars Statham as Chev Chelios, a professional hitman who gets double-crossed by some bad guys and is injected with a drug that stops the flow of adrenaline in his body. To keep his heart beating, he must engage in continuous exciting activities like driving recklessly through Los Angeles, taking drugs, and having sex with his girlfriend (played by Amy Smart). His quest for revenge (and an antidote) eventually leads him to a fistfight onboard a helicopter, and as we have since learned, he was actually fighting on an actual helicopter.

And, even better, you can tell in the scene that it’s not fake and that everyone is doing something way more dangerous than it needs to be. The camera in the Crank movies already moves pretty erratically, but it repeatedly pans off to the side as if to let the audience know that they’re really up in the air — even if they’re not one million miles up, like they seem to be later in the scene when it very obviously transitions to CGI. In fact, as the fight continues and Chev throws himself and his opponent out of the chopper, it becomes such an obvious green screen that it’s jarring. It makes you want to rewind and reassure yourself that the stunt actually looked real a minute earlier.

It’s that kind of ridiculousness — Jason Statham fighting a guy on a real helicopter and then transitioning to obvious CG — that made the Crank movies iconic at the time. Dumb things happen in those movies because they’re dumb, but they’re dumb in a good way, and there are few things dumber in Hollywood than asking someone (let alone the star of your movie) to hold onto a real flying helicopter during a fight scene. At the same time, though, Jason Statham wouldn’t be Jason Statham if he didn’t occasionally do stuff like this.

Elsewhere in that chat, Statham noted that he’s “nursing a lot of bad injuries,” and that, for guys like him and his Expendables co-star Sylvester Stallone, “a lot of the things we do, it’s because our ego gets in front of us, and we want it to be authentic. We want people to see that that’s us doing it. We want the audience to go for the ride.” He also said that he’s “getting a bit smarter now,” so that’s probably for the best.

Release Date

August 31, 2006

Runtime

88 minutes