Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
5/3/09
“F**k you, Chelios!”
-pretty much everybody
in Crank: High Voltage
Funny
thing about 2006's Jason Statham vehicle Crank: for all its'
pretensions to ultra-violent, hopped-up NC-17-baiting anarchism, I found
that it kinda laid there. Sure, writer/directors Mark Neveldine and
Brian Taylor used all the fancy camera tricks at their disposal and tossed
blood and sex about with reckless abandon, but at the end of the day their
story was still just a stock tale of a poisoned hitman chasing generic
criminal goons with a nasty streak that got in the way of a couple of great
leading characters. But as I often say, sometimes the best sequels
are to movies I didn't like, and here's another example. From opening
credits that play out the final moments of its' predecessor like the welcome
screen of a Nintendo-era video game, Crank: High Voltage is
90-odd minutes of pure cinematic anarchy. It doesn't all work; in
fact there were moments I couldn't even stand to watch. But for all
the horror and violence they've put onscreen, Neveldine and Taylor have
also finally licked the tone necessary to make a movie like this work.
Crank: High Voltage is like the grossest, coarsest Looney
Tune ever.
TV
News Reporter Fish Halman (John de Lancie) gives us the Breaking News:
Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) fell from a helicopter, slammed into the sidewalk
and was whisked away in an ambulance miraculously alive. How did
it happen? Why, because of “The famous Chelios Heart”, of course,
or so says the Doctor who removes said heart as the first of many planned
transplants into the 100-year-old body of mythical Triad leader Poon Dong
(David Carradine). But the Doctors need a mechanical heart to keep
Chev alive while waiting to do the other transplants, and even without
his heart, don't underestimate his super-human stamina. Chev hops
off the operating table, beats everyone within reach to a bloody pulp and
heads off in pursuit of Johnny Vang (Art Hsu) and a cooler he assumes holds
his heart. A quick call to faithful Doc Miles (Dwight Yokum) gives
him the skinny: artificial hearts aren't made for stressful activity,
so all that will keep him alive while cutting a trail of destruction across
LA is regular electrical charges to the device. Of course, once the
external power pack is crushed in a car crash, Chev needs to start taking
those charges himself: static electricity rubbing up against another
guy's arm, a shocking dog collar around his neck, sex with his faithful
girlfriend Eve (Amy Smart), battery cables on his tongue; whatever it takes
to keep the Artificial Chelios Heart beating long enough to get the real
one back. But that's not his only problem: goons working for
El Huron (Clifton Collins Jr.) are hunting Chev down to settle a score
of his own. Can the Full-Body Turrets-afflicted twin brother (Efrem
Ramirez) of an old ally help reunite Chev with the Chelios Heart before
it's too late?
Where
to begin summarizing the insanity that is Crank: High Voltage?
Like the original, this is a movie that likes its' hookers sleazy and its'
violence sadistic, but unlike Crank, it's also the kind of movie
where Chev enters a crack house to beat confessions out of witnesses and
stray arms, legs and heads start flying out the windows. It's the
kind of movie where Chev and Johnny are randomly replaced by actors in
giant rubber Chev and Johnny suits to have their showdown Godzilla-style.
It's the kind of movie where FBT (yes, Full Body Turrets) causes Ramirez's
character to just start randomly spazing out and flailing his arms and
legs with no notice. And above all else, it's the kind of sequel
where the severed head of an original Crank villain is being kept
alive “long enough to watch you die”. Crank: High Voltage
has no shame, knows no shame and probably hasn't even heard of shame.
At its' best, it's bloody hilarious. At its' worst, it's just plain
bloody. I could certainly have lived the rest of my days happy to
have never seen a man slice off his own nipples. But then again,
Neveldine and Taylor direct as though they'll be really disappointed if
there are any audience members they don't offend at least once.
Statham
makes a perfect square-jawed straight man for this nonsense, too frantic
to stop and take stock of the craziness around him and too cool to let
himself be overwhelmed by it. Amy Smart is an actress I don't always
connect with, but Eve is her Hamlet; an exhibitionist stripper with a heart
of gold and just enough of a dim streak that it actually makes sense when
a light bulb appears above her head at one point. But what makes
the character great is the sincerity of her affection for a man who's forever
trying to outrun the Grim Reaper. For all their sleazy craziness,
the heart of the Crank movies is that Chev and Eve really do love
each other. Probably not so much for Doc Miles and his life-in hooker
Dark Chocolate (Julanne Chidi Hill), but that's just another aspect of
a delightfully random character Yokum plays to deadpan perfection.
Ramirez is as delightfully shameless as one must be when playing a character
with FBT, while Carradine has a ball as the hundred-year-old Chinaman who
takes his second chance with the Chelios Heart as his cue to go cruising
for hookers and blow. Bai Ling throws herself completely into the
role of Ria, a sleazy, sleazy woman who spends the whole movie trying to
thank Chev properly for saving her life, but I was actually kinda frightened
by how successful she is.
I'd
love to know how many times Crank: High Voltage needed to
be resubmitted to the MPAA to attain its' R-rating because there's pretty
much nothing it doesn't do to the very razor's edge of the ratings system.
Bodily fluids both real and artificial (the silicon bit wasn't as bad as
the nipples but ugh!) flow freely and Chev and Eve essentially reenact
the Team America puppet sex montage with the naughty bits video-distorted.
It's all insanely crass but delivered with such a smile (the outtakes that
play over the end credits show a cast always on the verge of breaking down
laughing) that it's hard not to get caught up in the fun. This is
a movie that will do ANYTHING to get a reaction out of you, and as often
as not, my reaction was delight.
And
once in a while, it was revoltion. The squeamish, the easily offended
(even the occasionally offended), and those disinclined to laugh at a severed
head need not apply. But if your sense of humor is a little off-center
and your tolerance for R-rated humor is really high, Crank: High
Voltage is worth seeing just because you're not gonna see anything
else like it anytime soon. At least, unless the Famous Chelios Heart
keeps beating through another sequel. |
