Crank N' Mank Month #6 Crank 2: High Voltage (2009)
The ending of 2006’s Crank presents distinct challenges for a sequel in that it seemingly concludes with hero Chev Chelios’ death after he falls out of a helicopter and plummets to his seeming demise after calling girlfriend Eve (Amy Smart) to tell her that he loves her.
You seemingly can’t have a franchise if you kill your hero the first time around but Crank 2: High Voltage laughs defiantly at death before extending it the same middle finger it gives propriety and good taste.
Chev DEFINITELY should not have survived FALLING OUT OF A HELICOPTER. Then again that’s also true of a lot of what Chev experienced in Crank. Forget hard to kill: Statham’s bald badass is damn near impossible to kill.
Falling out of bed affects me more profoundly than plummeting out of a helicopter does the movie’s impossibly tough protagonist.
Crank 2: High Voltage impishly transforms a potential glaring weakness into a sneaky strength by really leaning into the ridiculousness of making a sequel about a man who CLEARLY FUCKING DIED in a previous film.
Returning champions Neveldine/Taylor make an inspired running joke out of Chev’s seemingly immortality, beginning with an anchor played by Star Trek: The Next Generation’s John DeLancie recounting Chev’s impossible survival with an entirely appropriate level of shocked disbelief.
The newsman winks at the audience and critics alike when he describes what has happened to Chev as “a story so bizarre I can scarcely believe the events I’m reporting” before chronicling a series of events that the newscaster himself confesses “can only be described as implausible.”
“Implausible” does not begin to do justice to Crank but Crank 2: High Voltage is so deliberately, deliriously bonkers that it makes its predecessor look like a work of Neo-realism by comparison.
Crank 2: High Voltage adorably feels the need to establish through dialogue that its protagonist has an enormous penis when Jason Statham conveys a level of Big Dick Energy the likes of which the big screen has not seen since the heyday of Ron Jeremy.
Chev wakes up after three months in a strange limbo between life and death to discover that he has been kept alive specifically because various nefarious characters want his super-human organs, starting with his enormous penis.
Oh, and that heart that was giving our boy so much trouble the last time around, in addition to just barely keeping alive? It has been removed and given to a very powerful man on the basis that it must be magical if it can keep a man alive when he should be dead many times over.
Needless to say, Chev is NOT comfortable with that so he springs to life and immediately begins kicking major ass. He learns from our old pal Doc Miles (Dwight Yoakam) that Chev is now the unhappy owner of a flimsy plastic heart that will stop working if it does not receive an endless series of electrical shocks.
The fundamental premise remains the same—seemingly unkillable man-beast on the verge of death must deliberately expose himself to an endless series of shocks just to stay alive—but the particulars have been tweaked ever so slightly.
Instead of needing perpetual bursts of adrenaline our perpetually desperate anti-hero now needs electricity. That makes him a singular cross between a moderately malevolent Superman and a sexy, swaggering badass Frankenstein’s Monster, a bald, brawling brute who needs sweet, sweet energy to stay alive the way Mary Shelley’s creation needed electricity to become sentient.
Crank 2: High Voltage sends its indestructible hero on a literally electrifying journey through Los Angeles’ criminal underworld as its hero tries to get back his heart from a powerful, ancient mobster played by David Carradine in what is either deeply problematic, racist casting or a wry commentary on racist, problematic casting.
Neveldine/Taylor’s magnificent follow-up to their breakthrough hit is full of inspired stunt casting that includes Corey Haim as a mullet-sporting dumbass who took up with Eve when she thought her boyfriend was dead and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia in a tongue-in-cheek cameo referencing his brief turn in the original as a hospital worker traumatized by his run-in with Chev.
Crank should wear out its welcome. There should be a point where all of the film’s deliberate, delirious excess should become exhausting rather than exciting. Conventional wisdom dictates that you simply cannot sustain that level of warped inspiration over the course of an entire film.
Yet that never happens with Crank or its sequel. The filmmakers never stop topping themselves in terms of ambition and audacity.
Crank 2: High Voltage subscribes to the principle of comic elevation. In the first Crank, for example, our hero and girlfriend Eve (Amy Smart) have exceedingly public sex, to the delight of dozens, if not hundreds of onlookers in order to keep the adrenaline flowing and our hero alive.
The sexy couple with the fetish for public copulation are at it again in Crank 2: High Voltage but this time they’re working their way through the Kama Sutra at a racetrack where their carnal endeavors are enjoyed by thousands of people excited to see a real show involving a dude with a really big penis.
If they make a third Crank movie Chev and Eve will have to go at it on the 50 yard line of the Super Bowl in front of an entire stadium full of voyeurs and billions worldwide just to avoid being anti-climactic.
How bonkers is Crank 2: High Voltage? One of the primary bad guys from the first movie makes a surprise appearance in the film's third act only this time HE’S A DISEMBODIED TALKING HEAD.
Yes, a bona fide disembodied talking head like you might see on Futurama. At another point Crank 2: High Voltage inexplicably becomes a Kaiju movie after Chev connects with some power lines and becomes as big and destructive as Godzilla.
It seems safe to assume that at no point in Crank 2: High Voltage were the filmmakers ever told to turn down the crazy. On the contrary, it feels like the only studio notes the writer-directors received were, “Could you make this more ridiculous?”
As those sequences betray, Crank 2: High Voltage movie has the remarkable, seemingly paradoxical quality of being at once an unusually pure action movie and a crazy comedy.
I chose to pair Mank with Crank because they have rhyming names but otherwise inhabit vastly different worlds but they have way more in common than you might think.
Mank is about a filmmaking pair that created a towering masterpiece so brilliant that it all but ensured that its director and screenwriters would never be able to create anything as great no matter how brilliant they might be.
Neveldine and Taylor are a filmmaking pair that created, in their debut film and its equally mind-blowing sequel, a trash masterpiece so wildly entertaining and imaginative that it promised to haunt them the rest of their careers.
With the exception of Brian Taylor’s 2017 dark comedy/horror shocker Mom and Dad, which starred Nicolas Cage, who was apparently in line for the lead role in Crank before scheduling conflicts interfered, nothing either man has done, separately or together, approaches the greatness of their debut.
Is Crank or Crank 2: High Voltage as good as Citizen Kane? Probably not. That is a pretty good movie. It’s literally the Citizen Kane of cinema but Crank and Crank 2: High Voltage are better, more entertaining and honest movies than Mank.
Crank is Neveldine/Taylor’s Citizen Kane. It’s their magnum opus, the one they will be remembered for. Like Citizen Kane, Crank and Crank 2: High Voltage are pretty much perfect, albeit in substantially different ways.
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