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Action movies are often characterized by blurb-happy reviewers as “roller coasters.” But if Jason Statham’s other action franchise — the Transporter series — is a roller coaster, Crank: High Voltage is a crazy train.
The sequel to 2006’s out-of-the-blue, over-the-red-line transgressive sleeper hit — about a guy who had to keep his pulse rate high or die — picks up literally where the story left off. It throws us into a mad world of gun-toting strippers, organ-stealing Chinese triads, picketing porn stars, explicit sex on a race track (with horses leaping overhead, exposing themselves to the camera and the saucer-eyes of sex-partner/leading-lady Amy Smart). And guns, guns, guns.
Yes, you can take individual episodes in this string of insane, winking set pieces and point directly to their antecedents in the works of Rodriguez or Tarantino (particularly when you encounter Kill Bill’s David Carradine as a 100-year-old triad leader).
But this is Tarantino with his finger literally in a light socket (Statham, if you haven’t seen the trailers, has been kidnapped, had his heart stolen and replaced with an artificial one that needs rezapping via tasers, electronic dog collars, etc). It is as much influenced by Looney Toons cartoons and Russ Meyer movies as it is by the anarchic new wave of action films. Ang it was edited, apparently, by someone with ADD.
The tone is set early with a reality-heightened L.A. newscast whose host (John DeLancie, Star Trek’s Q) is prone to describing events as “implausible” (almost as an aside to the audience). With that, we see Statham’s indestructible hitman Chev Chelios drifting into consciousness on an operating table and watching his heart being removed and replaced with the one he’ll be wreaking destruction with for the next 90 minutes.
Yes, it’s a comedy, the irony of which tends to soften all the P.C.-ignoring misogyny (one stripper in a peeler-club gun battle is shot in the chest and bleeds silicone), casual ethnic slurs (Bai Ling plays Ria, a caricature Chinese hooker crushing on Chelios after he saves her life. She says things like, “You my Kevin Costner, you save my life, you own me long time”) and general transgressiveness (as when Chelios kicks a still-living head into the ocean).
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Naturally, Chelios is such an alpha male, that as soon as he wakes up, he kills everybody in the recovery room and sets off on a mad chase for “my popper,” which is beating in the chest of the aforementioned triad leader Poon Dong. Waiting in the wings is his skeevy, hooker-crazy surgeon buddy Doc Miles (Dwight Yoakam), who’s prepping for transplant surgery between chubby-chasing sessions with his own favourite “escort.”
(If you’re wondering about the poison that was supposed to kill him if he slowed down in the last movie, there’s an offhand comment about Chelios being the first person ever to survive it).
The plot is so inconsequential that it begins to digress a la The Family Guy (at one point, we see Chelios as a delinquent child on a Dr. Phil-type British pop-psychology talk show). And every so often, there are Donkey Kong-quality graphics-cum-Powerpoint demonstrations to underline what has been said or done.
Really, the only thing that separates Crank: High Voltage from being a literal spoof of its own genre would be if someone actually threw a kitchen sink at someone.
Director: Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor
Starring: Jason Statham, Amy Smart, Bai Ling
Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes
jim.slotek@sunmedia.ca