Reviewed - Crank: Jason Statham becomes the bus in Speed in this idiotic but innovative romp through the streets of Los Angeles, writes Donald Clarke

Emerging in a spectacularly ghastly week for new releases, the latest explosion of lowbrow mayhem featuring Jason Statham (never knowingly under-geezered) takes on the quality of a masterpiece for the ages.

Actually, within its admittedly unchallenging genre, Crank, in which Statham's hired killer becomes the bus in Speed, just might be a work of genius. As relentlessly idiotic as it is genuinely innovative, as energetically playful as it is dubiously misogynistic, the film works through the possibilities of its high concept so frantically that the viewer, fearful that the fun cannot last, is constantly in a state of nervous apprehension.

But somehow the bicephalic debut director - a commercials duo, credited, annoyingly, as Neveldine/Taylor - manages to pull it off. Formal experiments with split-screen and subtitles, which could become deeply irritating in less skilled hands, add welcome variety to the grainy digital photography. Statham is unbeatably gruff. The jokes are sound. Disconnect your logic banks and you should have a ball.

The plot could be - and, maybe, originally was - scribbled on one king-size cigarette paper. Statham, a victim of that class of wilfully obtuse movie villain who refuses to just shoot his opponents, has been injected with a drug that will kill him if his heart rate drops below a certain level. He is thus forced to zoom manically about Los Angeles, guzzle down power drinks, have sex in public places and engage in any available activity likely to crank up the metabolism.

The film inevitably draws inspiration from Tarantino's broader moments and will remind some of the most frenzied of Asian exploitation features. But, in pop cultural terms, its greatest significance is as the first film to successfully transfer the unsavoury aesthetic of the video game Grand Theft Auto to the big screen. (Given the game's relentless allusions to cinema, this throws up more post-modern conundrums than we can deal with here.) Eagle-eyed gamers will note that one of the power-drinks Statham consumes is called Rock Star, surely an allusion to the developers of GTA. If none of this means anything to you, then Crank is probably not your kind of thing anyway.