For those of you that read last week’s review, you know that Crank is an absolutely insane movie.
Fact: Things get crazier in the sequel, Crank 2: High Voltage.
Crank: High Voltage finds Chev on an operating table. Somehow he survived the fall (things like logic, facts and science are irrelevant right now) and he’s been patched up by the Triads. Not because they love him, but because they plan to harvest his organs. After all he’s survived, they assume this guy must have some pretty good stuff in his chest. They’ve taken out his massive, indestructible heart and replaced it with an electric pump, meant to keep him alive while they rip the rest of his stuff out. When Chev wakes up they’re about to start on his man about town, and for him that’s just one organ too much. He’s off the operating table and out to get back his heart by killing everyone and everything between him and his most vital of organ. To keep going, he’ll need frequent electric charges, lest the mechanical heart stuck in his chest stop pumping.
This sets up more of the sheer insanity seen in the last movie. Chev engages in a wild orgy of killing and sex, starts to run out of juice, does something completely and wonderfully insane to recharge himself, and then returns to the orgy of gore and violence. His journey takes him everywhere from strip clubs to horse tracks. In one of those places he kills everyone and in the other one he has wild-ass naked, public sex. Guess which one is which. You’re wrong. You’ll either love it or you’ll hate it and if you hate it you’re not the kind of person who’s fun at parties.
Again, like I said regarding the first movie, this is not what you call an objectively good film. Like Crank before it, it’s a celebration of the most ludicrous and over the top film-making possible. In another era it would have been a grindhouse film, relegated to sleazy, dirty movie theaters in back allies where people slink in for bullets, breasts, foul language and the bashing of heads. It’s somewhat amazing that a movie like this can exist in this day and age.
So what to make of the film? On balance, I enjoyed the predecessor a little better, but this one gets props for never giving up in its attempts to turn things up to 11. It’s relentless, but there’s more humor than suspense. Once a movie concedes that it cares more about skits, set-ups, and punch lines than characters, there’s no room for real excitement or suspense, and that’s what’s missing. Fans of Crank and other overblown action films will find plenty to savor in Crank 2.