As I mentioned earlier, I rented "Crank: Hight Voltage" yesterday, the sequel to the action-packed first "Crank." I thought I had seen the first movie, but as I watched the second one, I realized I was mistaken. I now have to rent that so I know a little more background.
Anyway, the film picks up where the first one leaves off: Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) gets thrown out of a helicopter, hits a car on the road, bounces into the street, where a van pulls up, uses a shovel to pick him up and throw into the van, and he's taken away. Dead, right?
Wrong. Chev wakes up to open heart surgery by a group of Chinese surgeons. He sees his heart taken out, put in a red cooler and replaced by a plastic artificial heart. His heart is taken away by a goony looking dude with piercings all over his face. Chev passes out.
When he wakes up, he sees a diagram of what the surgeons intend to do: keep him alive for a while so they can harvest the rest of his organs. When he realizes the first one they want is his, ahem, "man organ," Chev decides enough is enough. He escapes leaving many bodies in his wake. His quest is to find his stolen heart, a bloody undertaking.
Along his way he meets his old flame Eve (Amy Smart) who has become a stripper in the three months since he last saw her. She acts as his sidekick on his journey, which goes from a strip club to a horsetrack to a guys limo, and on and on. The key factor is that in order to keep his artificial heart pumping, he must continually shock himself with something, be it a cops taser or grabbing "high voltage" equipment, and yes, even generating friction from body to body contact, something he and Eve perform on a horse race track, during a race.
The movie is crazy, and moves at hyper pace, with weird camera angles and weirder flash-backs and scenes. It's non-stop action, and actually pretty funny. I like Statham as an actor, and even the late David Carradine has a tiny role as an Asian gang lord. I'd like to see the first one too now so that I can really appreciate the second.
"Crank: High Voltage" is rated R for just about every possible reason: graitutious amounts of violence, gore, nudity and profanity. Definitely for an older, but not too old, crowd. The other key is you can't take it seriously. This movie makes fun of people who do. How else does Chelios survive a drop from a helicopter, and an action-packed day on an artificial heart?
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