Crank 2: High Voltage

dir: two shmucks called Neveldine & Taylor

2009

There really isn’t any point reviewing a film like this. Notice that I’m still writing. There’s no point because it’s like reviewing a headache, a baseball bat to the groin, an epileptic seizure, a finger amputation, and a bag of strychnine-laced crystal methamphetamine all jumbled together and shredded through an industrial sized rusty blender.

It exists less as an actual movie and more as a collage of violent imagery sped up mightily, completely uncaring as to whether an audience can even comprehend most of the shit it is viewing. Sure, we’re supposed to parse it through the obvious lens of a live action version of a computer game, so much so that sections play out like sequences from Grand Theft Auto and its myriad knockoffs.

But even beyond there it’s the making of something that makes no fucking sense at all, and doesn’t care, making up for the complete lack of coherence only by trying to keep the crazy momentum up and the visuals experimental and vivid.

Viewers who caught the first entry in this insane series might be perplexed as to how Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) could still be around in order to be the lead in this film as well, and the thing is, there’s no real explanation, and it hardly matters. The first flick was all about a professional hitman poisoned by some obscure triad drug which turned him into the bus from Speed: if his adrenalin fell too low, he’d die. So the lead loon spends the film trying to stay as hyper as possible whilst tracking down the people responsible. He also gets to shag his girlfriend in public, with half of Chinatown looking on in obvious delight.

The sequel centres around Chev, who is inexplicably still alive, having had his mighty heart extracted and replaced with an artificial one. He wants to track down the missing organ and exact revenge. Meanwhile, various people still want to torture and kill him because of the people he tortured or killed in the first flick.

What ensues is a jumbled and anarchic mess as he kills various people, various people try to kill him, and he finds new ways to recharge the battery in his puny mechanical heart. When he juices up, he is super-powered and all mighty. When it runs down, he’s feeble and kitten-like.

As in the first, he routinely takes a break from the insane action to call his doctor (Dwight Yoakum), who doles out the advice and the recommendations as well as some additional insane humour (I guess).

How seriously can you take a film when a guy applies jumper cables attached to a car battery to his tongue and nipples in order to kickstart his heart? How seriously can you take a flick where the ‘hero’ anally rapes a henchman with a shotgun (for which he had the decency to use some lubricant) in order to find out where his heart has gone?

How seriously can you take a flick where, in one of his final film roles before ‘accidentally’ asphyxiating himself to death in a Bangkok hotel room, David Carradine plays a wizened old Chinese triad called Poon Dong who, apart from having a new, mighty heart beating in his chest, also possesses a keenness for black prostitutes?

The truth is: You can’t. No-one can. No-one could.

No-one except Jason Statham, of course, who still plays the insane role with absolute seriousness, as if he has no fucking idea how ludicrous any of it is. As far as he’s concerned, apart from being able to swear like Begbie from Trainspotting, he’s Jimmy Stewart and Jason Bourne all rolled into one, playing the role like they’re going to shoot him afterwards regardless.

It’s perfect for this insane kind of movie. He has to act like having sex on the racetrack in front of a huge crowd of punters, like rubbing up against an old woman, like electrocuting yourself with high voltage cables, like all that noise makes a lick of sense. Conviction, is what you need. Not convictions, as in jail terms for the poseur / tryhard hipster douchebag directors responsible for this monstrosity should get for foisting upon a public that is already obese, addicted to sweet snacks, and very short on attention span? This is what decades of ADHD diagnoses and Ritalin prescriptions have led us to.

And it’s exactly what we deserve. This is not a flick I complement idly or ambivalently. This is terribly, horribly mind melting shite if you’re expecting a quality filmic experience. It’s a retarded, painful experience even if you weren’t expecting a quality filmic experience. But it definitely has its place in the cinematic canon. Even as utterly racist, unworthy, homophobic and downright fucking foul as it is, it’s got it’s moments.

There are films whose sole purpose for existing is, apart from the obvious commercial aspects, the desire or intention to convey at least one feeling or emotion. Hence the designation for genres like “horror”, “comedy” or “romance”. If a film can successfully put you into the demented mindspace of one hyperkinetic lunatic, then it can’t be a complete failure, even if nothing else in the flick makes sense.

Criticising the plot in a ultraviolent collage like this is redundant. It doesn’t fucking matter that it is nonsense. It’s a string of sketches, deliberately nonsensical, and intended for a specific audience that cares not one whit whether it makes any sense, involves any meaningful characters or resolves anything in a worthwhile way.

I mean, it goes out of its way to look like a video game, the most common piece of dialogue involves any and everyone screaming “Fuck You Chelios” at our, um, protagonist, and there’s even the decapitated head of his main opponent from the first movie as if it’s a particularly nasty episode of Futurama.

And there’s crazy drunken Chinese actress Bai Ling running around screaming mangled phrases that haven’t been heard since before the fall of Saigon. The best bit isn’t when she’s run into by a car, it’s probably when she’s on fire.

Speaking of people being on fire, now I’m not some prude offended by the notion of people simulating or actually having sex in movies or in reality. I know it happens. It doesn’t bug me. The scene at the race track, though, makes little sense, in that thousands of compulsive gamblers watching a horse race, which must be happening in slow motion, would be more worried about their horse not winning because of two humping morons on the track, rather than wondering which one of the humping morons is going to cross their own personal finish line first.

But it doesn’t matter, because it’s funny. Again, speaking of that tenuous and ephemeral concept known as “humour”, I like to think that David Carradine probably committed suicide after watching a screening of his work in this thoroughly disreputable movie. To add insult to asphyxiation, whether erotic or not, I don’t think they left any of his dialogue in the flick, though they had plenty of leering and dribbling. What a way to go.

I hesitate to say that I enjoyed it, because that implies that it’s enjoyable. The truth is there’s practically nothing to like about it except for the fact that it’s such a jagged violation of one’s ears and eyes that it almost entertains solely based on the magnitude of its effrontery. And there is something enjoyable about watching David Statham tortured for about an hour and a half.

The freakiest scene comes out of nowhere, and has our protagonist and his adversary turn into Godzilla – like Big Man Japan figures duking it out over a miniaturised power plant / substation, looking every bit as cheap and nasty as anything from fifty year’s ago. I would hesitate to call it audacious or hilarious, because it’s fucking not, but it is, like many of the scenes in the flick, so amusing just becomes it flies out of nowhere, and indicates how the people responsible for this flick really had no restrictions on any of their more insane ideas.

All of this almost makes up for the fact that the flick’s ending comes out of nowhere as well, and has to be wrapped up during the credits. In true Crank form, it doesn’t matter how it ends, it matters how fucked up you got along the way.

Watch it or don’t: you’re not missing out on anything, but, if you’re a film buff, you deserve being violated every now and then, just to keep your ego in check.

6 times this deserves to be on high rotation in prisons, nurseries, hospitals, asylums and dentist’s offices out of 10

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“Hey, I got five dollars says you blow me for twenty bucks.” – huh? – Crank 2: High Voltage