Review Round-Up: How I Spent My Summer Vacation; Count Brass; Crank

How I Spent My Summer Vacation (2012): It would be fair to say that Mel Gibson has been going through a rough patch for quite some time, but How I Spent My Summer Vacation is, at least, a step in the right direction.

Mel is an anonymous, professional criminal who ends up in a corrupt, overcrowded Mexican prison, while trying to evade US border police after his latest job.

In attempting to retrieve the stolen money stolen off of him by the officers who arrested him, he comes up against the top dog in the prison, Javi (Daniel Giménez Cacho) and his goons, who have taken a special interest in a 10-year-old boy (Kevin Hernandez), who has befriended Mel.

This isn't exactly epic material, but there's shades of Payback and the slightest hints of Lethal Weapon and Mad Max here, so it's a welcome addition to Mel's CV.

The script, by Mel himself, Adrian Grunberg and Stacy Perskie, with its knowing voice-over, isn't quite as clever as it'd like to be and there's just not quite enough action to put it on a par with his earlier cops and robbers' movies, but there are far worse ways to spend an hour-and-a-half.

I just wish Mel would make more movies like this...

Count Brass: Although The Chronicles of Castle Brass, of which Count Brass is first book, are a sequel to The History Of Runestaff - which I haven't read - in a 'mere' 150 pages Moorcock tells me everything I need to know about the earlier books and the characters' backgrounds and still manages to spin an entrancing, cross-dimensional tale.

Dorian Hawkmoon is a retired adventurer, settled in Castle Brass, who hears rumours of the ghost of his father-in-law, Count Brass, haunting the nearby marshes.

Investigating these claims, Hawkmoon becomes entangled in a plot to rewrite history that involves alternate dimensions and time travel.

Hawkmoon, another facet of the Eternal Champion, may not have the striking personality of Elric, but is still an engaging character - the adventurer who fought all his wars and just wants to settle down with his family, but gets drawn back in to events he thought long resolved by old friends he thought long dead.

As fascinating as it is poetic, Count Brass is a classic example of the magic of Moorcock, spinning a fully-rounded story, complete with a heart-wrenching twist, in a perfectly-digestible word count. Proof, if it was needed, when you look at the bulk of giant fantasy tomes groaning on the shelves of bookshops, that you don't always need thousands of pages to tell a great story.

Crank (2006): Who doesn't love a good Jason Statham action flick? He's this generation's Jean-Claude Van Damme cranking out (pun intended) a succession of all-action, minimum-brain, ultraviolent thrillers that invariably involve Statham kicking seven shades of snot out of hordes of bad guys.

Crank has Statham as hitman-for-hire Chev Chelios, ambushed by some particular bad people and dosed with a Chinese narcotic that gradually slows down his heart rate. The only way he can stay alive and track down the people who did this to him is to keep moving, keep his body pumped on Red Bull and drugs.

It's basically Speed, but with a human body instead of a bus - and a lot more swearing.

Co-directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, Crank is a high-octane videogame brought to life, with quite a few scenes mirroring popular games (particularly Grand Theft Auto), which pretty much tells you the level it's shooting for.

Stylistically brash and unrelentingly brutal, Crank is a breathless showcase of Statham's physical style (he did all his own fight and car stunts), interspliced with black humour and disorientating imagery.