Film Review | Crank 2: High Voltage (2009)

Crank 2: High Voltage is possibly best known to many for its "so bad it's good" tagline: "He was dead... But he got better". Amusing in a ridiculous, throwaway kind of way. If only the same could be said for the film...

Picking up exactly where Crank left off, Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) begins the film lying in the middle of the road having just plummeted from a helicopter. Barely clinging to life, Chelios is kidnapped by Chinese gangsters who remove his heart, replacing it with an artificial replacement only intended for short term usage. Chelios escapes and begins hunting down the people who have taken his heart, all the while having to find ways to pass electricity through his body to keep his artificial heart working.

Co-writers and directors Neveldine and Taylor clearly believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Simply put, if you liked Crank, you'll almost certainly lap up Crank 2; equally, if you weren't such a fan of the first film, the second will do nothing to sway your opinion of the franchise.

But whilst Crank had more than its share of problems, it was redeemed at least in part by individual moments of creative flair and invention. Crank 2 has none of this. The action feels tired and repetitive, and even though it's clear that Neveldine/Taylor believe they've raised the extreme nature of the franchise a few notches from the first outing, this regularly comes across as just too ridiculous or too gross to be entertaining, instead prompting laughs of derision. There are a couple of surprisingly surreal moments - including one where a fight between Chelios and an adversary is realised in the style of a classic Godzilla film - but these come across as confusing more than anything else.

With the extreme nature of the action ramped up, unfortunately so too are all the things that are unpleasant about Chev Chelios' world. The racism and sexism are even more prevalent here than in the first film. The Chinese and Latino gangsters throughout never stray from lazy and offensive stereotypes (Neveldine/Taylor even manage to get rice-picker hats in), and racial slurs are thrown about without a hint of tongue in cheek. Every female character is a sex object, and the vast majority are either strippers or prostitutes. But, in the interest of taking things further than in the first film, Crank 2 also finds room for homophobia and mockery of the mentally disabled, playing both for as many laughs as possible and never succeeding.

Crank 2 ends up retreading an awful lot of familiar ground from Crank - in fact there are whole sequences which may as well be lifted wholesale from the first film - but in a less interesting, less impressive and more offensive way. There were actually a couple of points during the film where I questioned whether or not I wanted to plough on to the end, something which I very rarely consider even with the most tedious of films. The tagline may be "so bad it's good", but the film it's attached to is just bad. And when the tagline is the best thing about a film, things can't get much worse.

2/10

Film Review | Crank (2006)

At one point during Crank, Jason Statham's character, Chev Chelios, is driving at high speed with gangsters in pursuit, with the gangsters shooting at him and Chelios shooting back; all the while Chelios receives fellatio from his girlfriend Eve (Amy Smart). This by and large sums up Crank: if it sounds like something you'd enjoy, then you'll probably love it. If not, stay very far away.

The whole thing is based around a simple yet extreme concept. Chelios, a hitman in working in Los Angeles, has been poisoned by gangster Ricky Verona (Jose Pablo Cantillo) with something known as "The Beijing Cocktail", which inhibits adrenalin from flowing through his body, eventually killing him by stopping his heart completely. After consulting with mob physician Doc Miles (Dwight Yoakam), Chelios ascertains that he must keep his adrenaline flowing through pain, fear and excitement, leading to a city wide rampage as he hunts down Verona for revenge and an antidote.

There are points in Crank which show some genuine craftsmanship on the parts of co-writer-director duo Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. The use of subtitles and captions at places in the film is creative, and the pair at times show they know their way around a decent action sequence. Watching Chelios drive through a shopping mall like a demented Blues Brother, crashing his car sideways onto an escalator, is fiendishly entertaining, especially as Statham neither bats an eyelid nor misses a beat throughout.

Other times, the choices the pair make are less successful. There are some needlessly irritating camera angles at times, although these seem to get less prominent as the film progresses; some odd choices are made with sound effects at the start of the film too, although again these seem to drop off later on. The link to video games is made, but it's anything but subtle, with the opening credits sequence smacking you in the face with it through garish colours and hackneyed '80s style arcade sequences. There are also several action sequences which aren't nearly as successful as the shopping mall scene, leaving us feeling like we've seen parts of Crank many times before.

The biggest problem I had was with the world Chelios inhabits. Crank is definitely not set in our reality. This is a world where racism is funny (Chelios steals a cab at one point by throwing its Middle Eastern driver out of his seat and shouting "Al Qaeda!"), women are treated purely as objects (bikini-clad girls are even seen enclosed in transparent spheres, literally being used as ornaments) and all men are interested in is sex, crime, video games and shooting each other. Chelios himself isn't a very sympathetic protagonist, fitting in perfectly to his chauvinistic, prejudiced surroundings; there were several points where his heart threatened to stop, and I wouldn't have been that bothered if he'd popped his clogs there and then.

Crank isn't all bad, but there's also far too little here to praise. If you're looking for something that challenges the action genre, doing something new with the well-worn codes and conventions, Crank is definitely not it. However, if you don't mind the genre being set back several years, or you're an avid reader of Nuts or Zoo magazine, you will almost certainly lap it up.

4/10