Crank

A professional killer (Jason Statham) has been injected with a fast-acting poison with no antidote, and he has only an hour or so in which to find and punish the people who did it to him. The 1950 noir classic D.O.A. gets updated with a twist borrowed from Speed: Our antihero has to keep his adrenaline flowing at a manic rate, or he’ll die even faster. First-time writer-directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor bill themselves as “Neveldine/Taylor” as if they’re in too big a hurry even to mention their first names, and that’s how the whole movie is: frantic, breakneck and raucous. Pow! Bam! It’s certainly never boring, but it’s never very interesting either. Statham still has that menacing star power that suggests he’s bound for better things, and Amy Smart is sweetly funny as his dim-witted girlfriend.