April 2009 - Sprocket Holed

The first half of the middle chapter of what will undoubtedly become the Crank tetralogy (Chev Chelios' story now feels exactly half complete) is frisky and charmingly retarded, if not quite as inspired as its predecessor (think Escape From L.A. or Army of Darkness). This time writer-directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor don’t have the WTF element of surprise on their side, although it’s hard to chastise any sequel that opens with a newscaster describing the events of the first film as “implausible bullshit” and ends with a talking head in a jar. (I confess to a lifelong bias for pickled heads and/or brains in cinema. It’s something you just can’t get from statuary.)

Jason Statham reprises his career-defining role as the Britishly tenacious Chev Chelios, who seems to have survived being poisoned by “that Chinese shit” from the first film by falling out of a helicopter from 40,000 feet onto Wilshire Blvd., then having his heart removed by different Chinese people and replaced with an electric pump that comes with a handy battery-pack belt adorned with five lights that glow green or red. (Why they kept Chev alive at all if all they were after were his “strawberry tart” and sausage, I was a little unclear on). Like their poison, Chinese anesthesiology is no match for Chev’s irritation (nor, it would seem, are they very skilled couriers), and within a couple crushed testicles and shotgun-barrel sodomies he’s on the streets, shaking down pimps and random strangers for information, all of whom have exactly the intel he needs but refuse to give it up until he does something creative and painful to them. (Just between this movie and Watchmen, I’m pretty sure I’ve already witnessed fifty-seven onscreen interrogation scenes in 2009, and I haven’t even seen the Jonas Brothers movie yet.)

Bai Ling turns up periodically as a mangy, raving racial caricature who’s comically smitten by Chev’s total disinterest in her. She’s not too central to most of the action, though, so her entries and exits tend to get closer and closer together. At one point the filmmakers get her out of a scene by having her broadsided by a car, which like Chev Chelios she doesn’t mind much. In the Crank mythos, the good (i.e., better-looking) characters and evil (i.e., tattooed) ones both undergo about the same punishment levels, but only the bad guys feel pain. It’s kind of like Home Alone, only with Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern as the heroes and Bai Ling as that old snow-shovel guy.

That’s the main thing that kind of ruins Crank: High Voltage – way too many cameos. Between, Ling, Corey Haim, David Carradine, a bunch of porn stars, Ginger Spice as Ma Chelios, Dwight Yoakum as Chev’s lovably horny physician, and a buffed-out Efren Ramirez (Neveldine/Taylor give us not one but two fraternal revelations of major characters that somehow Chev never heard of before) providing carefully rationed slices of comic relief, there’s barely any room left for Amy Smart as Chev’s lovably dim-witted (and horny) girlfriend Eve. (Not enough Amy Smart is my usual gripe.)

When we first see Eve, she’s working in some ratty club as a stripper named Lemon because, as she explains to Chev, “I thought you were dead for three months” (apparently Eve wasn’t a stripper in the first movie). Instead of Chinatown, this time out Statham bangs her like a ragdoll at Hollywood Park on the racetrack while the crowd cheers and horse-penises soar in slo mo overhead* and an old woman that Chev groped earlier gasps with erotic horror. They’re not having sex just for gratuitous fun-loving reasons, despite the number of positions they switch to, but only because Chev’s electric battery-pack is down to one red bulb, which means he needs “friction” as opposed to the electricity he's been getting from cigarette lighters and jumper-cables thus far (often to the wry headshakes of passersby who’ve just seen him smash through a windshield). Later, Jason Statham turns into Godzilla. Still later, he has sex on the beach with Bai Ling while they’re both on fire. It’s a date movie.

Crank: High Voltage is wacky, and we like wacky, and sometimes gross-out funny, and we're down with that too, but I kind of wished there had been more variety to the action, which tends to be pretty heavy on generic interchangeable shoot-outs (another swimming pool denouement? really?). And the electric heart is actually pretty reliable compared to poison or even real hearts put through the same "paces" (get it?), so there’s not much sense of the first movie’s breakneck race-against-time (he also doesn't actually take any "crank" this time, which is kinda like if "The Wire" didn't have a wire one season). Chev’s indestructibility is sort of taken for granted at this point, by both the audience and the characters, which is funnier but also makes him less substantive as a protagonist. The filmmakers go to the trouble to explain that Chev was laid up in a coma for three months as a result of the injuries he sustained in the first film – the sequel may as well be set the same day as far as he’s concerned, or as Eve is for that matter.

But to nitpick Crank: High Voltage is dumber than anything in the movie itself. Inspired by videogames, it’s more like a game expansion than a sequel, but if you’re too young to see it, ditching school, baked to the point of paralysis, and Dragonball: Evolution is sold out, you'll only remember the good parts anyway.

*A man, a woman, and a kid whom I assume was theirs walked out during the racetrack sex scene, after abiding through dozens of decapitations and dismemberments. Because I’m a “synchronicity” buff, I like to think that they were the same trio who walked out of my Watchmen screening a few weeks back, and will walk out of whatever movie I see next month, and again, etc., until decades from now the four of us will have a reunion, which I’ll book the same theatre for, and out of which they’ll solemnly trudge only a few words into my welcome speech.

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