Chev Chelios is back, and he is still dying. Crank: High Voltage, the 2009 sequel to the 2006 film, finds the titular character facing a new threat: his heart has been harvested, replaced with a battery-powered ticker, and the clock on his life is now measured in the single digits. The film is pure, relentless chaos, and it knows exactly what it is. It is a movie that wants to be a scream, a spectacle, a punch in the face.
It gets exactly one of those three things right.
Trailer, via Lionsgate Movies.
Chev Chelios and the Heart That Runs on a Battery
The premise is simple and absurd. Chev wakes from a fall off a helicopter to find that Chinese doctors have removed his heart and replaced it with an artificial one. The battery pack keeps him alive for an hour, and when it runs out, the internal battery kicks in. Chev must charge himself at every possible moment, whether by sex on a racetrack or by having a driver use jumper cables on him. The plan is brutal, effective, and completely bonkers.
Jason Statham plays Chev with a manic energy that matches the film’s relentless momentum. He is not a hero in any conventional sense. He is a man who has nothing left to lose, and he moves through the story with a relentless, sometimes gleeful determination. His performance is the reason the film holds together as long as it does.
The Cast Around the Heart
The supporting cast is a wild assortment of characters from Chev’s past, each with their own reason for wanting him dead or alive. Dwight Yoakam plays Doc Miles, Chev’s old mafia surgeon who explains the mechanics of the artificial heart. Efren Ramirez plays Venus, the brother of Chev’s late informant Kaylo. Bai Ling plays Ria, a prostitute who leads Chev to the strip club where Johnny Vang, the antagonist, is hiding. Clifton Collins Jr. plays Jesus “El Hurón” Verona, the mobster who wants Chev dead for reasons never fully explained.
The film takes a peculiar pleasure in its own excess. The cameos are a running joke, with celebrities like Ron Jeremy, Ed Powers, Jenna Haze, Nick Manning, Lexington Steele, Chester Bennington, Glenn Howerton, Maynard James Keenan, Danny Lohner, Keith Jardine, Lauren Holly, and Lloyd Kaufman all making appearances. It is a list that would be impressive if the film needed it, but here it just adds to the general feeling of being overwhelmed.
Where the Heart Breaks Down
The film’s central gimmick is its ticking-clock premise, and it works for stretches. Chev’s search for his heart is genuinely tense when the movie remembers to make it about the clock. But the plot is a mess of intersecting mobsters, drug dealers, and assassins, and it never quite coheres into a satisfying shape. The film is too busy being loud, too busy being fast, to give the audience a clear sense of what it is trying to do.
The action is over-the-top. Chev chases across a racetrack, gets into a car crash, and escapes a building in flames. The violence is excessive, and it is almost always presented with a grinning, gleeful sense of disregard for the rules of the road. That is the point, but the film goes so far that it loses the sense of danger that made the first Crank feel thrilling.
The Heart of the Matter
There are several elements that hold the film back from being the runaway success it wants to be.
- The plot: scattered and unfocused, with too many characters and too little reason for them to matter.
- The pacing: the film never breathes, and the constant motion makes it hard to stay invested in any single moment.
- The tone: the film is so gleefully offensive that it loses the sense of danger that made the first Crank thrilling.
The film is at its best when it is purely physical, when it is about Chev moving through a space with pure, unfiltered energy. The moment where Eve has sex with Chev on the racetrack, generating enough friction to charge the heart, is a genuine highlight. It is absurd, it is gross, and it is also kind of brilliant. The film understands that its own excess is its appeal, and it plays that to the hilt.
A Battery That Runs on Screams
Crank: High Voltage is a film that is trying to be a scream. It wants to be shocking, offensive, and relentlessly entertaining. It gets close to that, but it never quite commits. The film is a mess, but it is a messy, loud, over-the-top mess. It is not a film you will think about after it ends. It is a film you will remember for a few minutes at the start of the next one.
The film’s most striking achievement is Statham’s performance. He gives Chev a manic, unfiltered energy that carries the film when the script cannot. The rest of the film is a cacophony of excess that is fun in bursts but tiring over time. The cameos are a running joke, the violence is excessive, and the plot is a scattered mess.
This is a film that needs to be taken at face value. It is not a work of great cinema. It is a film that is trying to be a scream, and it mostly achieves that. It is a film that will be remembered for its excess, not for any particular craft.
It is a film that is best enjoyed in the moment, and then forgotten as quickly as possible.
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