Crank: High Voltage (review)So Wrong, So Right
Just. So. Wrong. Seriously. Like, take a look back at everything I wrote about the first Crank, and how wrong and evil and amoral and filthy and sordid that flick was, and double it. No, quintuple it. Also: quintuple how much I laughed. Oh, I know we’re not supposed to intellectualize a movie like this one, because it’s all just baddest-of-badasses Jason Statham running around Los Angeles giving himself electric shocks every five minutes just to stay alive (see, cuz his heart has been involuntarily donated to-- well, I’ll get to that) and man! it’s just so cool that he is one crazy-ass motherfucker! shit! But I can’t help it: there’s reasons why I can laugh spontaneously at the mayhem and the murder and the sweeping just-plain-wrongness here when most other iterations of similar stuff leaves me cold. And I think I owe it you, dear reader, and to anyone who relies on me for moviegoing advice, to explain. Mostly, it’s because the writing-and-directing team of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor are crazy-ass paradigm-busting convention-ignoring badass cinematic motherfuckers. Shit! They ain’t having fun with vulgarity or violence: vulgarity and violence are merely their medium. They are having fun with movies, and with what we think movies can do or are supposed to do. Look: When we left Statham’s (Death Race, The Bank Job) Chev Chelios at the close of Crank, he was falling out of a helicopter. He was falling out a helicopter. And High Voltage picks up right there. Chev Chelios is still falling out of that helicopter. And Neveldine and Taylor do not cheat by having Chelios wake up out of dream -- ha ha! he wasn’t actually falling out of a helicopter at all! -- or by letting the whole rest of the movie unfurl as a flashback that happens just before Chev hits the ground. No: Chev Chelios hits the ground. And then he is, um, collected off the street in a manner that would more befit something the Road Runner might do to collect a flattened Wile E. Coyote off the pavement. Holy Chuck Jones, but I laughed at that: They used a what? No! This is when, of course, that Chev Chelios is elevated to a sort of cinematic godhood, becomes the apotheosis of the indestructible action hero: when he does not die after plunging to the earth from a helicopter high above Los Angeles. Neveldine and Taylor have given themselves the freedom to do whatever they fucking want to Chelios after that, and it’s cool, and we can’t complain about it. And that’s okay too, because Neveldine and Taylor explicitly call bullshit on themselves before going any further, which then allows them to actively dispense with plausibility and make a virtue of outrageous coincidence. Which they do, again and again, up to the point and then beyond the point at which you can’t believe they thought they could keep getting away with it. The constant escalation to their inventive insanity is so breathtaking, it’s like a slap in the face to the tired hacks who make the glossy hidebound junk that passes for an action movie these days. Amping up the explosions and crashing a wider variety of vehicles into one another does not constitute “taking the action movie to a new level.” Fucking pulling your hero’s heart of his chest and forcing him to chase after it does. And I haven’t even mentioned how Neveldine and Taylor made their magnificently godforsaken little sequel on the cheap with camcorders they bought at Best Buy. Take that, Michael Bay. Right: so Chev wakes up after the helicopter plunge to discover that his heart is being stolen to be transplanted into the 100-year-old Chinese mobster who’s impressed that Chev survived that cocktail of poisons he’d been injected with in the first movie. And by “wakes up to discover,” I mean, of course, that Chelios awakens during the course of this demented surgery to see his own ticker being lifted out of his chest, and a battery-powered artificial heart being dropped in. (Why not let Chelios die? Oh, you’ll see.) But this is hardly a thing for a man who survived falling out of a helicopter, and it’s barely the beginning of the crazy shit that Neveldine and Taylor will put him through. There’s an ugly-beautiful inevitability to Crank: High Voltage, as if this is where The Movies had to go, as soon as someone had the balls to take them there. Thank Chuck Jones for Neveldine and Taylor. I can’t even begin to imagine what they’ve got in mind for Crank 3. support
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Mon Apr 20 09, 4:44PM categories: reviews > 2009 theatrical releases permalink 11 pre-Disqus comments Disqus comments infoMPAA: rated R for frenetic strong bloody violence throughout, crude and graphic sexual content, nudity and pervasive language viewed at a public multiplex screening official site IMDB trailer more reviews at: Movie Review Query Engine dvdAmazon U.S. Amazon U.K. tip jarshare
read moreaction black comedy related· question of the day: How would great female filmmakers describe their work in ways comparable to the machismo of male filmmakers? · May 29: DVD alternatives to this weekend’s multiplex offerings · Gamer (review) · trailer break: ‘Gamer’ · Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (trailer) · Jonah Hex (review) · question of the day: What’s your most anticipated comic book movie of 2010? · August 28: DVD alternatives to this weekend’s multiplex offerings · U.K. box office: ‘Monsters vs. Aliens’ is back on top · DVD alternatives to this weekend’s multiplex offerings bloggyprevious post: watch it: “Planet Of The Dead - Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre” next post: the oh-no! DVD of the week: ‘Into the Blue 2: The Reef’ |
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pre-Disqus comments
posted by Newbs (Mon Apr 20 09, 5:48PM)
Can't wait!
Reviews like this are why you're such a great critic, MaryAnn; it gives you mad respectability when you can love a movie like Crank 2 unabashedly, and also hate something like Paul Blart.
posted by MBI (Mon Apr 20 09, 8:54PM)
Yeah, yeah, pretty much. That all about covers it.
I love Con Air in much the same way.
posted by Mathias (Mon Apr 20 09, 9:45PM)
This movie was 100% pure unrestrained insanity.
And i loved every second of it.
posted by Drave (Tue Apr 21 09, 3:57AM)
Hmm... Best Buy, you say...
You speak much truth about this movie.
posted by hdj (Tue Apr 21 09, 9:56PM)
Just got back from the movies after seeing Crank 2 with my Girl Friend. Jason Steak'um, as my girl friend calls him, kicks some serious as in this movie.
We loved it, its just packed with boobs and bullets, and its ludicrous.
I think it mighta been you M.J , your review for the first one that got me to see Crank, because everyone I know would tell me " dont bother its just some dumb LA based grand theft auto shazel". They were wrong and, if you didn't back this movie I probably would still be downing todays new Chuck Norris,
I'm really hoping for Crank 3, but like you said , how could that top this one?
I'm hearing reviewers , not Maryann, but other say, this was like " Shoot'em up" and in alot of ways thats right but, at the same time this crank and the last one , its much crazier. Hands down much crazier , its just got alot more balls.
posted by MaryAnn (Tue Apr 21 09, 10:07PM)
It is kinda like *Shoot ’Em Up,* which I really liked, too: my review.
posted by Ryan (Wed Apr 22 09, 2:29AM)
This movie was a divine shit meteor, a gargantuan piece of crap that hits you like a tank and leaves you feeling like you got hit with, well, a huge mass of feces. That said...someone had to do it. Like you said, MaryAnn, SOMEONE had to make this movie. By the time the movie got to the Godzilla scene, I got it (which makes me slow, I know). This movie is IT: the movie against which all other frenetic, soul scarring junk will be judged. Good luck topping it; it's pure lack of self-respect may well be impossible to replicate. Ten, twenty, fifty years from now, people will still look back on this as the pinnacle of ADHD testosterone movie making. Congratulations, Neveldine/Taylor. You have left your mark on the world. Now, how do you sleep at night?
posted by Hdj (Wed Apr 22 09, 10:54AM)
Ryan 50 years from now this movie will be topped. Crank maybe looked back at starting a genre thats just been waiting to be set in motion, it was going to happen, which leads me to believe that other testosterone fueled directors will only continue to add on to this generation of ADHD movies. And if they stop making movies like this i'm gunna protest will FBT ( full body tourettes)
posted by Saladinho (Tue May 12 09, 3:22PM)
I've never said before, but this is literally one of the best, most persuasive reviews I've ever fucking read. I had no interest in Crank 2 (having not seen Crank one), but because of this, I have to see both films. Dammit!
posted by Roberto (Mon Sep 28 09, 1:18PM)
Unfortunately rotten tomatoes is filled with old ladies with hairdo´s taken straight from the eighties. Thats´s why the movie got only 62%.
"boorish, bigoted and borderline pornographic., lousy picture, etc,etc." They need to remove reviews from this "golden girls" because they are too narrow minded for todays comedy.
I LOVED crank high voltage, .and specially loved this review.
posted by Angelique (Sat Jul 17 10, 12:54AM)
I fucking hated this movie. In fact, I hated it so much I didn't finish it, and I went to Rotten Tomatoes to see what other people thought of this awful movie. I laughed once, when Bai Ling attacked the john with a bicycle. I didn't laugh again. It was so overstuffed with racism and misogyny that I couldn't find anything to laugh at.
I don't think using women's bodies as decoration and taking away all elements of their personhood is funny. I don't think racist epithets are funny. I don't think gruesome violence is funny. I don't think racial stereotypes are funny. I don't think anal rape is funny. I don't thing violence against sex workers is funny. This movie was mean-spirited, unfunny, offensive trash with no redeemable qualities. It was not impressively filmed, the dialogue was neither interesting nor inventive, the characterizations were flat (and offensive) stereotypes. I honestly wonder what kind of person could see such poorly executed offensive trash and find it to be not just passable, but full-out enjoyable.
I am not unable to find offensive material funny, I am unable to find unfunny offensive material funny. It's not a joke to call someone a chink. If you are going to do so, and call it a joke, you have to actually tell a joke. You know, one of those things with a set-up and a punchline. Making a sentence does not equal telling a joke. Threatening to shoot someone who has done nothing to you personally and then sticking a large object up their ass is not funny. Maybe if he had a funny reaction, maybe if they accompanied it with and odd sound effect, maybe if...they bothered to make it funny it would have been.