Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the guys behind Crank, have another thing coming out this year, though it’s been easy to overlook with all the Crank 2 publicity Lionsgate has been churning out.

Game stars Gerard Butler and Michael C. Hall in a near-future story about a death row inmate (Butler) who is the unlikely star of an online multiplayer game invented by Hall. Butler is controlled by a kid through the game’s interface; naturally he wants to break free of his acne-ridden puppeteer.

So is this just The Running Man, but updated for the Counter-strike /
World of Warcraft crowd? Or is there going to be some eXistenZ sorta
layered narrative going on here? Knowing these guys I’m expecting only
the former, and that might be good enough.

I hate the Marilyn Manson Eurythmics cover laid over this Italian trailer — the rendition of the song is bad enough alone, and here it really distracts from the actual content. You know, all the explosions and reaction shots. Takes a lot to process all that.

This trailer was evidently posted at JoBlo, but their site is even more difficult to dig through than ours can be. The link to them on Trailer Addict’s page goes nowhere, so I’m posting TA’s version. If any of the JoBlo folks want to email me a link to their hosted version that works, I’ll happily replace this.