Shockingly sick

Mainstream movies have a tendency to approximate graphic sex and violence rather than presenting them outright and unfiltered. Not so with Crank: High Voltage. The carnage contained in this horrific video game of a film (the sequel to 2006's Crank, a critical and commercial flop) is simultaneously convincing and utterly absurd.

The sum total of writer/director team Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor's narrative is as follows: A brash, ballsy hunk of an English hitman named Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) wakes up on the operating table of a team of organ harvesters minus his heart, a la urban legends featuring tourists coming to in bathtubs full of ice, sans kidneys. In place of Chelios' seemingly essential organ is an electric ticker with a limited reserve of juice. After fighting his way free, Chelios careens around Los Angeles in search of his "strawberry tart" (as he refers to it), wreaking unspeakable havoc and pausing periodically to recharge his waning batteries by shocking himself senseless with stun guns, electric lighters, transformer stations and even some friction-generation copulation.

The plot is so incidental to the filmmakers that they actually push the finale into the credits (beware: plot spoiler), restoring Chelios' heart in between sets of attributions. A clearer signal of the team's contempt for storytelling is difficult to imagine.

One requires a far stronger word than gratuitous to convey the spectacle of pain and sex that unfolds over the course of the film's 96-minute running time. Highlights - or low points, as it were - include a violent mob erupting from a porn actors' strike, an oafish thug who is quite literally raped with a shotgun (no merciful cutaway shots here), enormous breast implants pierced by bullets oozing a mixture of blood and silicone, and a tattoo-covered gangster forced to saw off his own nipples.

Such excessive imagery is just the tip of the iceberg. Crank: High Voltage is a veritable orgy of T&A, torture porn and mortal combat. Amy Smart is as hot as it gets as Chelios' modern-day moll, Eve, standing out in a crowd of scantily clad vixens, streetwalkers and strippers. One wonders what the woman was thinking when she accepted the role, featuring as it does more sexual acts than snippets of dialogue. And such dialogue! Chelios' guttersnipe British slang is riddled with inane attempts at wit. The phrase "never better" becomes "Tiger Woods," and "Greek" serves as a stand-in for "perfect." You get the idea.

Dwight Yoakam is his usual revolting self as the intensely misogynistic Doc Miles (at least this time around his character is actually intended to come off as a disgusting cretin). The man should stick to country music. Ling Bai runs wild as a caricature of a drug-addled whore who falls in love (if you can even call it that) with Chelios after he inadvertently saves her wretched life.

The film is pointless, to be sure, but it is not without a certain level of panache. Jump cuts and flashy edits abound, and Mike Patton's soundtrack is an effective medley of postmodern spins on Western epics and samurai flicks, interspersed with roaring rock that accompanies Chelios' incessant fixes of electricity. The premise is an obvious metaphor for drug addiction, with the protagonist continually running down and amping up in a deadly dance with a "power source," without which he cannot live. Needless to say, the fact that the film's title is a synonym for methamphetamine was no accident.

Some level of cinematic dexterity on the part of the filmmakers aside, however, the experience of taking in all the sex and gore is traumatizing. Leaving the cinema, the otherwise picturesque streets of Prague took on a sickening seediness, and, were it not for the politeness and dignified bearing of passers-by, the impression would have lingered far longer. It is difficult to imagine the depraved tastes of the sort of fanboy who has been anxiously awaiting this film's release, and it is reassuring that the franchise has failed to strike paydirt at the box office. The final moments of the film clearly allude to a Crank 3, and we can only hope that the investors behind this abomination opt to pass on another installment.

James Walling can be reached at
jwalling@praguepost.com