Crank: High Voltage - 2009

I never saw Crank, and I'm actually quite pleased, because only seeing one of the Crank franchise is enough to make you realise you don't need to see a sequel. A bizarre, insane, silly, violent and downright ridiculous film starring one of the least charismatic and appealing leading men of recent years in Jason Statham. Crank tells the "story", and I use the term loosely, of Chev Chelios. The film begins with him falling out of a plane and surviving, only for some Asians to come along and remove his heart. Before they have the chance to harvest the rest of his body Chelios, powered by an electrically charged false heart, is awake and killing those responsible. He has little over an hour to find his heart and through a series of bizarre sequences must contiunally electrically charge his fake heart. The film would make a superb comedy, except that is seems to take itself rather seriously and tries to develop a convoluted plot involving Triads, Mexicans and prostitutes. It may have been that I haven't seen the original so a lot of these characters didn't see to have any characterisation, but where the film let me down was that it didn't have any good action sequences to help carry it along.

Jason Statham spends most of the film angry or electrocuted and occasionally both. He attracts skinny "sexy" hangers on - one of whom I believe was his girlfriend - who he has a close to pornographic, though not arousing sex scene in the middle of a race track; the climax arrving as a horse jumps over them, massive cock on display and all.

As you can tell the film is full of inventive, imaginative and creative ways of telling its story - its just that there really isn't a story, just an excuse to have an extremely, violent, explicit "action" film which never succeeds on any front.