Crank: High Voltage Review
Written and Directed by: Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor
Starring: Jason Statham, Amy Smart, Dwight Yoakam, David Carradine, Corey Haim, Bai Ling

In this age of limitless digital entertainment and sensory overload, it’s hard for film to compete with so many other forms of media like TV, video games and the internet. So writer/director team Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor have found the perfect way to cut through all the distractions: by making movies that are about as close as possible to a video game without plugging in a controller. I’m not talking about literal Uwe Boll-style video game adaptations, but rather movies that capture the same kineticism, seizure-inducing visuals and instant gratification that a video game provides.

With Crank: High Voltage they’ve set out to make another high-octane action movie for the A.D.D. generation, which is made abundantly clear from the retro 8-bit-style opening credit sequence. While their approach to this film is somewhat unique, it is also extremely aggressive, and liable to give some viewers a headache by the time all is said and done. Although there are brief flashes of genius within the madness, I still can’t quite bring myself to give this one a thumbs up.

I should mention right up front that I haven’t seen the original Crank, but I don’t think there are too many blanks that need to be filled in. In the first film, hitman Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) is injected with a poison that will stop his heart within an hour if he doesn’t keep his adrenaline pumping at all times. The movie concludes with his death, which left many people wondering how they could possibly do a sequel. This time around, he awakes on a hospital bed only to find that his heart has been replaced with a mechanical one, and he is being kept alive so that his organs can be harvested and sold on the black market. He escapes from his captors and embarks on a quest to reclaim his heart, all the while stopping to recharge his artificial ticker along the way.

Except for the re-appearance of a few characters, I wasn’t very confused by any plot elements in this film. That said, the movie definitely does mess with your head due to its frenetic pacing and rapid-fire editing. Crank 2 was shot entirely on prosumer digital video cameras, allowing Neveldine and Taylor to indulge in an overload of gritty handheld camera work and extreme close-ups, mixed with colourful subtitles and strange animated inserts. It all adds up to a chaotic collage of imagery that I must admit, I have never quite seen before. There are moments where it feels like an avante-garde experiment of sorts, and the erratic style certainly keeps in sync with the main character’s state of mind. It also does a good job of disguising the movie’s relatively low budget. Unfortunately, as the movie progresses, the style begins to wear you down, to the point where you are desperate for even just a few seconds of restraint (which, of course, never come).

I might have been willing to put up with more of the insanity if there were actually some characters on screen that I found compelling, but almost everyone is loud and exaggerated, designed specifically to grate on your nerves. Yes this is the world of a hitman, but even for a hitman it is one special hell. The ridiculous concept of recharging a mechanical heart is going to turn a lot of people off in the first place, but if that’s not enough, the low-brow humour, sleazy sex and unadulterated violence will test your patience as they push the limits of bad taste.

The majority of this film feels like it was written by 16-year-old males for 16-year-old males. It can’t go for five minutes without showing a little T&A, and some of the jokes are so infantile it is painful. There is little question that the movie is both sexist and racist: every single woman in the movie is either a stripper or a prostitute, and all of the bad guys are minorities with ridiculous accents and every other stereotype in the book. I suppose it’s possible that this is some sort of clever commentary on the dystopian world of Grand Theft Auto, but something tells me that would be giving the directors a little too much credit.

Now I realize that these are caricatures, and the whole movie was never meant to be taken seriously; in fact, from what I understand the sequel is a lot more of a comedy than the first one was. It’s not that Crank: High Voltage actually offended me, it’s the idea that someone thought this stuff can and should generate laughs that is a little bit disturbing. The movie only won me over when it went for the truly absurd, like the power station battle (their tribute to Godzilla), the talk show dream sequence and the disembodied head. More of that stuff would have been great. I also did enjoy the original music provided by Faith No More’s Mike Patton, which suited the dark and hallucinatory nature of the movie quite well.

In my mind, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor give Rob Zombie, Tony Scott and Guy Ritchie some serious competition for the title of most obnoxious directors working today. Having a strong sense of style is not a bad thing, but the problem with Neveldine and Taylor is that they seem to still be placing more value on cheap thrills than making a decent movie. Maybe their next film Citizen Game will be the one that finally wins me over. Either way I’m confident that Crank: High Voltage will still develop a small cult following of people that appreciate it for the insane, unrelenting, un-PC trash that it is. — Sean

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