A heartfelt appreciation for the frenetic twins of Crank.
NEVELDINE/TAYLOR HAD ‘DISTINCTIVE, UNREPEATABLE VISION’
With great surprise I paused, reading the film program for the Toronto International Film Festival last September, as my eyes landed on the director credit listed beneath a Midnight Madness title called Mom and Dad: “Directed by Brian Taylor.”
Was it really possible, I wondered doubtfully, that Taylor had disengaged himself from his once- inseparable collaborator Mark Neveldine and made a movie on his own, one invited no less to grace the hallowed red carpets of TIFF? It didn’t seem likely. So firm was this filmmaking alliance that they were credited not as Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor but as Neveldine/ Taylor — less duo than bona fide brand. Nor was theirs the sort of cinema one expects to find at a prestigious international film festival. They were gifted artists, to be sure — their art was simply too vulgar for a reputable setting.
Brian Taylor is indeed the same director, now working solo. His first independent venture, the violent horrorcomedy Mom and Dad, opened theatrically across Canada this weekend, and it is a crude object of many merits — though not quite the merits of Taylor’s work with Neveldine. ( The latter directed a film without his partner in 2015, a foundfootage exorcism picture called The Vatican Tapes, that was not well- received and quickly forgotten.) If Mom and Dad marks the definite end of the collaboration, if diverging inclinations or the curse of “creative differences” has ruptured the partnership for certain, then mainstream American cinema has suffered a loss that ought to be lamented. Neveldine/ Taylor were virtuosos possessed of a distinctive, unrepeatable vision, which for little more than half a decade they were afforded the extraordinary chance to realize with nearly unlimited means.
Like many directors of inventiveness and r est - less energy, Neveldine and Taylor started out worki ng on music videos and commercials, emerging in the early 2000s from film school ( Taylor in Los Angeles, Neveldine in upstate New York) with a reputation for resourcefulness and imagination. One of their earliest accomplishments was a matter of innovative problem- solving: in need of a better way to shoot smooth tracking shots on the fly, they invented a new variety of steadicam designed to be operated on rollerblades, which they dubbed the Roller Dolly. Frustrated by the limitations of film, they embraced the liberating elegance of inexpensive digital camcorders; they preferred freedom of movement and speed in all things over old- fashioned ideas of quality. Which would precisely prove the spirit of their Hollywood features — action blockbusters so un- conventional in form they qualified as radical.
The first was Crank: an outrageous, offensive, almost experimental thriller starring Jason Statham as a hit man endeavouring to outpace a death sentence. Statham plays Chev Chelios, tragically poisoned, as the movie opens, with a mysterious Chinese toxin that will soon stop his heart. There is no antidote, but death can be forestalled by adrenalin — the only way for Chelios to remain alive long enough to exact revenge on his assassins, in other words, is to keep moving.
The premise was lifted from Rudolph Mate’s classic film noir D.O. A. from 1950, in which a poisoned man, with only hours to live, attempts to solve his own murder. But in Crank’s case the style itself is given the same death sentence. As Chelios runs, shoots and fights his way through Los Angeles in a bid to keep his doomed heart wildly pumping, the movie zooms forward with the same manic vigour, the camera zipping and flying in an esthetic frenzy. It’s as if the film has been given the same dictum as Chelios: if you don’t want to die, keep moving.
This untrammelled lunatic intensity makes Crank a delightful experience. It also gives it the flavour of the avant- garde — particularly circa 2006, when shooting an entire mainstream feature on hand- held HD cameras and jamming the results together with hyper-frenetic editing was unheard of. (Because trail-blazing art is never recognized when it appears, Crank was received cooly by critics who largely failed to recognize anything resembling innovation or challenging craft. Only in retrospect has the film been accorded its proper due.) Crank ends with an appropriate flourish of fevered spectacle: Chelios falls from a helicopter and, after a heartfelt mid- air farewell phone call to his girlfriend’s answering machine, smacks down on the pavement in the middle of an L. A. street. His limp form before the camera on the road is the last thing we see before a smash-cut to black.
It was only right, then, that Crank: High Voltage, the 2009 sequel, should pick up the second where its predecessor left off — with Chelios left for dead in the street, his heart on the verge of stopping at last. This being a Neveldine/ Taylor film, Chelios is swiftly ushered off the road and into the dubious care of surgeons tasked with replacing his heart. Of course the lousy artificial one he gets instead is battery operated, and powered by electricity.
As he once again runs, shoots and fights his way through Los Angeles, Chelios is obliged to periodically juice up by way of car batteries, defibrillators and (in one memorable instance without much narrative logic) public fornication. And the movie itself is obliged to amplify its formal inventiveness: the directors introduce dream sequences, animation and even a full- blown Japanese kaiju battle. It’s every bit as dazzling as that description sounds, and the rare sequel that improves on the previous film.
Later the same year Neveldine/ Taylor produced Gamer, a big- budget science- fiction extravaganza about a dystopian video game and the death- row inmates forced to compete in it — Running Man with more brazenly unorthodox flair. It is an excellent film. A few years on they made the Nicholas Cage comic book movie Ghost Rider: Spirit of the Vengeance, which, by contrast, is so conventional that it’s difficult to believe it was made by the same guys. That might have taken something out of them: after this demoralizing experience ( and widely panned result), Nev el di ne/ Taylor never directed a film together again. Yet, anyway.
I suppose it’s only natural that their frenzied talent should disappear as speedily as it arrived — it’s true to the spirit of Crank that Neveldine/ Taylor would turn up, make a couple of marvellous movies, and then explode back into obscurity. Then again, even Crank 2 seemed an impossible proposition before it materialized. High Voltage ends with an indelible image: Chelios burned alive, emerging triumphant over his murderers and giving the middle finger directly to the camera.
Is it too much to hope that in that salutation there’s the prospect of a Crank 3?