If you had to trace the origins of the modern action movie, one possible starting place is 2006’s Crank. The Jason Statham movie received mixed reviews and was only a mild financial success, but it captured an idea that would live on in the 21st century. Crank took the concept of the ‘90s hit Speed — the inability to slow down — and personalized it. Speed’s idea was to imagine the destruction that would fall upon a city if one anodyne part of its infrastructure, a bus, couldn’t stop. Crank asked what would happen if that was a person.
