What's it about?In the best sequel idea since Chow Yun Fat played his own previously unmentioned twin brother in
A Better Tomorrow II, Jason "Chev Chelios" Statham wakes up on an operating table (after having survived a fall that would have liquefied any non-Statham) to find his heart being replaced with a big-ass battery.* Hey, we've all been there, right?
Any chicks in the movie? Amy Smart returns as his girlfriend, and the deeply unpleasant Bai Ling shows up as the World's Most Irritating Prostitute. How Bai Ling gets work in movies is beyond me. She's got a body that looks like somebody stapled her head on top of a rubber novelty chicken.
Awesomeness Factor?Stratospheric.
Crank 2 is like the Platonic ideal of an action movie, profoundly unconcerned with the pedestrian narrative concerns that plague other sadder, lesser movies that don't have the balls to be
Crank 2**. It's a movie that is more than willing -
eager, you might say - to cut away from a scene to show you a ferret's ball-sack or the massive man-shaft of a thoroughbred racehorse for no real reason. It's a movie that gets real-life Bible-thumpin' moron Corey "I'm Still Alive?" Haim to not only play a mulleted loser pimp but then has Amy Smart beat the ever-living shit out of him for laughs. Technically, it has the elements of what would constitute a normal motion picture, like a plot and characters, but then tosses them away so that Chev Chelios can jack himself with a power grid transformer or shoot up a strip club full of people who had the extreme misfortune of not being Jason Statham. Meanwhile the insane perverts behind the camera throw enough avant-garde film treatments and camera trickery at you to fuel a thousand student film festivals, unable to focus their attention on anything for longer than a few seconds without trying to either blow it up, fuck it, or both. If DVD rental places had any balls at all, they would replace all the Criterion Collection discs with burned copies of
Crank 2 instead and, when you opened the case, Statham's fist would jump through time and space and punch you in the face.
Mitigated by?The only mitigating factor is that maybe
Crank 2 didn't make enough money for there to be a
Crank 3, but I refuse to live in a universe where there is no
Crank 3. My guess for the next one: He's just, like,
on fire all the time. TRADEMARKED!
* In this incredible ability to resurrect himself Statham is like Jesus, if Jesus wasn't such a fucking pussy.
** Like, I don't know,
Schindler's List. That movie would have been like twenty seconds long if Statham was Liam Neeson.
