Amoral High Voltage Turns Up the Juice
Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) should be dead. He fell out of a helicopter, after all, plummeting to Earth strangling the one for responsible for trying to murder him with some Chinese poison. No one survives that sort of thing, not even this superhuman hitman, the pavement below too strong an adversary even for him.
Jason Statham and Amy Smart are electric in Lionsgate's Crank: High Voltage
Or not. Waking up on a medical table he discovers two doctors ready to dissect him, a strange belt connected to a battery around his waist and a six-inch scar on his chest right where his heart should be. Undeniably upset but with only a limited amount of electricity running his nervous system, Chelios picks up where he left off only today he’s not out to kill those responsible for murdering him. Instead, he wants get back his missing organ, those standing in his way just fodder for his maniacal and bloody retribution.
Crank: High Voltage is everything I thought it would be and more. The bizarre sequel to 2006’s surprise cult favorite Crank (it ended up having a life of its own on DVD), writers and directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor craft an action epic that’s every bit as chaotic, disgusting, violent, perverse and sickeningly over-the-top as anything I’ve ever seen. This is a mongrel of motion picture, and if anyone can find a single thing socially redeemable about any aspect of it I’d be 100-percent surprised.
And I’m okay with that. While I’m not going to kid anyone and claim this to be a good film (not even close), for what it sets out to do it certainly gets the job done. The whole thing is a gigantic, schizophrenic and hardcore cartoon of blood, guts and lunacy, the filmmakers moving it along with such ferocity and speed a person almost can’t help but wonder what’s going to happen next.
I don’t know why either of these surreal manifestations of grotesquerie don’t really bother me. Both revel in hyperkinetic nihilism, so diseased and horrific you almost feel like you need to take a shower to wash clean after watching them. Yet they are made with such outright devil-may-care abandon, such impressively orgiastic glee, that they become quite captivating. They’re pulp fiction cocktails pulled straight out of a blender with a severed finger left in for color, and as much as I wanted to turn away and vomit a part of me was having so much fun taking in all the pandemonium I just couldn’t do it.
Admittedly, this sequel doesn’t quite pack the same charge (excuse the pun – I couldn’t resist) as the original did. That one pushed the boundaries to their absolute breaking point to begin with so really all Neveldine and Taylor could do was revisit (i.e. stuff like public displays of fornication, jolts of explicit nudity and seemingly random exploding heads) what they’d done before.
Yet there are some surprises, not the least of which is a decapitated villain from the last film making a somewhat watery cameo. There’s also a bit with a shotgun that’s highly uncomforting, while actress Amy Smart apparently is willing to make as big of a fool as possible of herself in order to secure a (hopefully) decent paycheck.
I’m not about to recommend this film. It’s ugly and amoral, full of so many reasons it should be flushed straight down the toilet I can’t possibly count them all. But the simple fact is that if you were captivated by the first one, as I admittedly was myself, chances are the same thing is going to happen this time around. Crank: High Voltage is an extreme bit of lunacy that must be seen to be believed, just don’t say you weren’t warned about what you were getting into after wards.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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