Hollywood has a long history of directors reworking their earlier works with more money and more experience in order to realise their cult debuts. Sam Raimi essentially remade The Evil Dead with extra whammy with the superlatively cartoonish Evil Dead II and even Don Coscerelli gave Phantasm another crack with superior effects and set pieces with it’s incredibly awesome sequel. However, the award for the most deranged second-go-round may go to lunatic action auteurs Brian Taylor and Mark Neveldine who took their famously manic 2006 oddity, Crank and supercharged it with enough juice to topple a sexually aggressive elephant.
Somehow crammed with more gleeful, un-PC energy than the first, Crank 2 is less a coherent action flick than smacked-out fusion of Grand Theft Auto and Jackass – but how can you not love a movie whose tag-line reads: He Was Dead… But He Got Better?
Three months after weathering a heart-slowing Chinese poison and falling thousands of feet out of a helicopter, slap’-head hitman Chev Chelios awakes in a makeshift surgery to find that his heart has been removed and been replaced with an artificial organ that runs on battery power. Figuring that he probably shouldn’t hang around any longer lest he finds other body parts being donated to other parties, Chev fights his way out and after some unusual coercion techniques (lubed shotgun up the anus for the win) finds he’s on another ticking clock.
After a quick phone call to degenerate medic Doc Miles, Chev finds out that to keep his artificial strawberry tart beating, he’s going to have to utilise a number of outlandish tactics to keep it charged that range from repeatedly blasting himself with a police taser to hooking his tongue and nipples up to a car battery to keep his ticker ticking.
However, running around California, looking for his missing heart isn’t going to be quite that simple when he finds that both the heart-stealing Triads and a cadre of Mexican gangsters are both after him while he hunts for Johnny Vang, the pierced gangster who is literally carting his pumper across town.
Both helping and hindering in his quest are a string of equally exaggerated characters such as estranged girlfriend Eve, who has taken up stripping since Chev’s “death”; excitable, barely coherent stripper Ria; Venus, a man with full body tourettes who wishes to avenge the murder of his brother abd ancient Triad Poon Dong, who’s rickety body is waiting for a transplant of Chev’s stolen organ.
But what does flamboyant gangster El Huron (aka. The Ferret) have to do with all this and what will it take to make this turbo-charged trip to crazy town finally come to an end.
It may be something of a conservative estimate, but the first Crank may have been one of the most noticably irresponsible, American action movies ever made that offset its tight budget and limited means with a raucous, “fuck you” attitude that spoke volumes through both Jason Statham’s hulking performance and Neveldine and Taylor’s batshit-yet-inventive direction. Yet, as bonkers as Crank was, Crank’s second coming leaves it looking as stuffy as a party political broadcast in comparison and his charges headlong into territory so deliberately stupid, it almost achieves a sort of bad taste nirvana that’s usually only obtained by Troma.
Be warned, this movie is aggressively not for the easily offended, because to offend is exactly what its main (maybe even sole) purpose is supposed to be as it barrels headlong through racist slurs, homophobic comments, gratuitous nudity, public sex acts and the sight of Statham grinding himself up a terrified little old lady in order to generate friction.
In the hands of less savvy creators, Crank: High Voltage would be borderline unwatchable, but the two writer/directors are far too smart for that, instead continuing to make their smash mouth epic a grotesque parody of violent, open sand box video games such as GTA and Saint’s Row. The entire movie plays like a super-violent video game session played though a barely conscious bong-haze and when taken as such, obtains a type of comedy genius that might not be apparent to those less familiar with the gaming world.
Statham is still great, happily willing to allow himself to basically be not much more than a crash-test dummy with a foul vocabulary as the script simply has him be an unwilling avatar to the chaos that radiates out from him like a nuclear blast. Essentially an unkillable action staple funneled through the MTV antics of Johnny Knoxville and Steve-O, he’s a blast to be with as he turns and raspd his way through countless mortifying experiences. Elsewhere, Amy Smart’s Eve fairs slightly better from the more exaggerated tone than in the first film as her ditzy girlfriend character takes more of the same punishment than before, but with better humour. It’s still a thankless role, but not many other actresses could pull off having a near-religious experience while gazing at a passing horse cock while having an orgasm in public at a crowded race track.
Not everything works. The fact that Neveldine and Taylor genuinely seem to be making this shit up as they go along means that some scenes naturally fall flat, Bai Ling’s pointless ranting comes with some hard, Jar Jar Binks energy and Efren Ramirez’s uncontrollable body flailing just isn’t that funny. Also, some of the casual racism and homophobia, parody or not, simply isn’t going to fly with some people and David Carradine’s cameo as an elderly, Chinese mob boss may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
However, the movie goes unfeasibly hard by telling you that none of this shit should be taken seriously and if for some reason, you still don’t get it after a bravura sequence where a fight scene cuts to giant, rubbery, Kaiju versions of Chelios and Vang brawling in a scaled down set, you probably shouldn’t have put the film on in the first place…
By the time the film reaches its absurd conclusion, the directors have given us numerous electrocutions, the sight of Statham zapping himself with an electric dog collar and the punting of the revived, severed head of the previous movie’s villain – but of that all wasn’t enough, the filmmakers drive their point fully home with the unforgettable final image of Chev, partially ablaze, striding up to the camera and giving us the finger as he bellows like an animal. “If you don’t get the joke”, they seem to be saying, “then go fuck yourself”.
Offensive? Dumb? Hilarious? Subtle as a fart at a christening? All of the above? High Voltage is guilty as charged.
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