Confessions of a film snob: Why I loved Crank 2 - High Voltage
So judging by the box office returns I think it’s safe to say that I’m just about the only member of the lodge who even saw Crank 2. Yeah, I could have saw ‘The Soloist’ or ‘Sugar’ or something subtitled...but no. The second I saw the trailer for Crank 2 I knew it was my destiny to see it opening weekend.
It’s easy to dismiss the Crank movies. Jason Statham doesn’t exactly scream thespian. The man has not only starred in a Paul W.S Anderson film but also in a film from the only person ever to win a lifetime achievement award from the Razzies: Uwe Boll. The co-directors, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, have never directed anything else according to IMDB but they both worked on the magnum opus, ‘Biker Boyz’ (Neveldine is credited as the ‘extreme visual sequences creator’. Sounds like a job you would apply for in the Mountain Dew marketing department).
It has been suggested by many people that have known me that I am a film snob. So how is it that I love these movies like Joe loves jack & coke at Sounders games? I submit the following reasons:
You're crazy man. I like you....but you're crazy.
So, in case you don’t know, here’s a quick rundown of the Crank films:
Crank 1: Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) is injected with a poison that will kill him in 1 hour. In order to keep the poison at bay he has to keep his adrenaline flowing until he can get his hands on the antidote. Shenanigans ensue.
Crank 2: After surviving a fall from a helicopter thousands of feet up, Chev is captured and his heart is removed and replaced with an artificial heart. In order to keep his fake heart beating he has to keep it electrically charged until he can get his hands on his new heart. Even crazier shenanigans ensue.
I imagine the writing of the Crank movies involved the filmmakers coming up with as many weird action moments as the can ("and then he literally shoves a shotgun up a guys ass!") and then finding a connective thread to hopefully link them ('We'll cut to a godzilla style fight!")
In the course of 100 minutes you are bombarded with non stop action thats slightly off kilter from anything you'd see anywhere else. You have to at least respect the originality of it all.
Return of the 80’s action film
Somewhere in the 90’s, macho action films became passé’. Stallone, Van Damme, Segal, Schwarzenegger...all of these guys used were huge action stars who all saw their careers derail at roughly the same time. Peoples interest in over the top action flicks waned. The reasons were completely reasonable. We started asking for more of our action heroes, CG became more important than the stars, we liked a little bit of intelligence mixed into our action.
But at the same time, how cool are movies like ‘Red Dawn’, ‘Commando’, etc.? We’ve all seen those movies...multiple times. What happened to those? Well they kind of morphed. I think the biggest thing that happened was the humor angle. You could do these films still, but you could no longer play them completely straight faced anymore. Audiences had keyed into how ridiculous these flicks were. The tone became much more tongue in cheek. This style led to movies like ‘The Rundown’, ‘The Transporter’ etc. I see ‘Crank’ as a natural evolution of this genre.
Enter the Haim