But now that Sean Connery—formerly the most fuckable human being on the planet—is fat, old and smelly, there is only one man worthy of stepping into his hand-tooled Patrick Cox of Bond Street chelsea boots (with a laser-guided-missile-spitting gyrocopter hidden in the left heel).
I'm talking prematurely bald, posh English hard bastard Jason Stratham. You loved him in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, you adored him in The Transporter and you got down on your unworthy knees and worshipped him as a god in Transporter 2. Well, go see him in Crank (now showing at a cinema near you) and be convinced, as I am, that this quietly spoken, typically understated and guns 'n' kung-fu savvy super-Brit would make the perfect 007.
Look, you gotta see Crank. It's the best movie about partial nudity, public sex and senseless violence ever. Remember that classic episode of The Simpsons where Homer starts ranting about the movie Speed. "I saw this movie about a bus that had to SPEED around a city, keeping its SPEED over 50 and if its SPEED dropped it would explode! I think it was called The Bus that Couldn't Slow Down."
Well, Crank is about a chap who has to has to speed 'round a city engaging in increasingly deranged homicidal stunts—blowing shit up, shagging birds and butchering baddies with extreme predge—'cause if his heart rate drops below a certain level, his torso will explode, flinging chunks of liver and kidneys and shit flying in all directions like a shattered flesh piñata. It should be called The Shaven-Headed English Hard Bastard Who Couldn't Slow Down.
Wow. What a simply amazing concept. It's Speed without the bus. It's Snakes on a Plane without any snakes. Or a plane. And, like SoaP, it was kept away from sneering cinema-snobs like me so we couldn't churn out condescending, audience-killing reviews full of lines like "one deplores the lack of intelligent character development in this fascistic mélange of gratuitous gunplay and sordid sensuality." I don't know what they were worried about. In fact, I'd like to take this opportunity to applaud the lack of intelligent character development. In my experience, the more intelligent character development, the less gratuitous gunplay and sordid sensuality. And, to be honest, I'm not totally sure what "mélange" means. But I'm pretty certain it's a sort of omelet.
I heart Jason Stratham. But not in a straight way. He's gotta be the new Bond He's got the body of a god, the martial arts skills of a ninja and the face of week-old baby. He is, in short, the perfect action hero for mums who're really into choreographed violence. And the scene in Crank where Jase stands up on a stolen police motorbike and adopts the crucifixion posture while "Everybody's Talkin at Me" plays in the background and his hospital gown flutters in the breeze to reveal his superbly muscled buttocks is ... uh ... uh ... shit, I think I've just made a mess.