Review of Crank: High Voltage (2009) by David J — 16 Aug 2010

We are living in the age of sequels. The biggest movies of the year are usually sequels to something. Hollywood studios like sequels because they feel it?s a safe bet. They are so terrified by the idea of having to market something new that even movies that don?t make money are given sequels. Crank: High Voltage is such a movie. Its predecessor, Crank (2006) was in and out of the box-office pretty quick. It was a disposable action movie whose major satisfaction was that it killed an hour and a half. But I thought it was a success, and I liked it enough to see the second one when it was on late night on Movie Central.

The new Crank is essentially a grindhouse action movie. It is very violent and exploitive in order to get a rise out of the audience. There are scenes where people are sexually degraded, and where women are beaten up on, which are played for laughs. There are also vulgar shots of gore which are intended to produce a wincing smile from the audience. But those shots are more deplorable than anything else. I like crude humour, but I found the jokes here to be intended cruelly and lacking any cleverness.

The premise of the first Crank involved Jason Statham being forced to rely on adrenaline in order to keep his heart pumping. In this movie he needs electricity to do the same. There is a scene where Statham gets juiced, and remarks ?feels like crack.? The feeling the filmmakers wanted the audience to feel is the same. I'm not going to say they weren?t successful at that. The movie is so cut up and all over the place that every scene is a barely coherent mess. Every single scene is staged so nihilistically, it puts the editors of MTV to shame.

There is no use going into detail about the plot because it doesn?t matter. No one who made this movie cares about the storyline. Here is the purpose of the movie: hit the audience with as much violence and sex as possible, and make sure the running time is no longer than it has to be. I can imagine after the first cut was shown to the studio executives, one of them turned to the movies two directors and said, ?Not bad, now go back and crank it up to 11.?

What I found most appealing about the movie was the little amounts of martial arts action by Statham. It was well choreographed and exciting. It?s too bad most of the stunt work is ruined by the over stylization. Majority of the action is gunplay that is same old, same old. I also like Statham as an action hero. I think he has charisma as a dispatcher of bad guy pain, and in dishing out trash talk. Even though he?s on screen for about 97% of this movie, I couldn?t pay much attention to him. I kept thinking are we ever going to get a stationary camera shot that lasts more than half a second, and an image that isn't somehow distorted.

I'm sure there will be some people who read this, and think what I`ve been described throughout this review sounds like a pretty good time at the movies. Maybe for them it will be a good time. But I need something that is more than MTV on crack (which I?m sure the filmmakers would take as a compliment).