The film opens with a sequence designed to look like a classic video game, depicting Chev Chelios' (Jason Statham) fall from a helicopter during the final moments of the original Crank. Immediately after his fall, he is scooped off the street via snow shovel by group of Chinese medics and removed from the scene.
He wakes up in a makeshift hospital and sees doctors removing his heart while Johnny Vang (Art Hsu) watches. The doctors place Chev's heart in a red cooler with a padlock, and place a clear plastic artificial heart in his chest. Chev passes out. He wakes up, and escapes. He notices a yellow battery pack is attached to him. After a gunfight and the interrogation of a thug, Chev learns the location of Johnny Vang - the Cypress Social Club.
Chev calls Doc Miles (Dwight Yoakam), who tells him that he has been fitted with an AbioCor Artificial heart. Once the external battery pack runs out, the internal battery will kick in and he will have one hour before it stops working. He crashes his car right after the conversation, destroying his external battery pack. In order to keep going, Chev has the driver use his jumper cables on himself, and runs to the Club.
With its combination of fourth-wall-shattering onscreen graphics, self-conscious art direction and camera moves, ADHD editing, incongruous song choices (lowriders blast Little Anthony and the Imperials’ “Tears on My Pillow” on their car stereo, for instance), pneumatic nudity and outrageous ultra-violence, “Crank: High Voltage” is, in its own unique way, pure cinema.
Imagine a gonzo collaboration between Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Bay and Tex Avery on a weekend meth binge, and you begin to get an idea of what writer-directors Mark Neveldine and Brad Taylor have up their sleeves.
Jason Statham returns as hit man Chev Chelios, a.k.a. the lad who would not die; Statham is to “Crank” what the bus is to “Speed.” In the first movie, he had to keep creating adrenaline to stop a cocktail of toxins from entering his system. This time around, Chev must constantly electrocute himself to keep the artificial heart in his chest beating.
The fact that he’s got a pulse at all comes as something of a shock, since the first “Crank” ends with Chev falling out of a high-flying helicopter, bouncing off a car and landing on the asphalt in downtown L.A. As “High Voltage” starts up, a mysterious black van comes by and scoops up Chev. He wakes up on an operating table, having just had his heart removed by shady doctors working for the triads. When he realizes that the next organ the surgeons plan to harvest is between his legs, Chev blasts his way out of there, and so begins a new chase.
Familiar friends — including Amy Smart as Chev’s girlfriend Eve and Dwight Yoakam as his shady physician — and enemies pop up again, as do some new members of the ensemble, including Clifton Collins Jr. as a crime kingpin with vendetta on his mind, Michael Weston (also appearing in this week’s “State of Play”) as an EMT, David Carradine as a 100-year-old triad lord and former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell in flashback as Chev’s mum.
Admittedly, things begin to drag the tiniest bit towards the end — if one can use the word “drag” to describe a shootout at a Catalina mansion where Latino gang-bangers try to repel an invading army of Uzi-toting exotic dancers and gay African-American bikers. But who besides Chev can handle this much non-stop stimulation?
To call “Crank: High Voltage” sexist, racist or homophobic, incidentally, is to assume that this is a movie about human beings, which it is not. It’s more like a testosterone-soaked, definitely-not-for-children cartoon, and I mean that in the best way possible.
Whether or not you admire what “Crank: High Voltage” is doing, there’s no denying that the movie gives its vision 111 percent. And as films feel more and more like a compromise between the money people and the test audience and, oh yeah, the artist, that counts for a lot.
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar