Crank: High Voltage

It's rare that I actually have the time, to say nothing of the inclination, to write a full review here. But by the same token, it's rare that I'm moved enough by a film to do so. I often lament the state of popular culture today. I feel that its importance as a lasting sign of the times has given way to being immediately, intensely gratifying and instantly disposable: another sign that the internet is both increasing our need and decreasing our desire for an analog written record. How the future will view our culture depends as much upon the record we leave behind as our political and geographical history; art is a means by which we connect to history and find some sort of context therein. This is why I occasionally wake up in the middle of night terrified that future generations or alien races will one day, instead of discovering Citizen Kane or Arrested Development, find Meet the Spartans or Keeping Up with the Kardashians and will judge our society by them.

I believe, as do many folks, that the responsibility of the artist is not only to produce something to put up for interpretation or scrutiny, but to be reflective of the times in some sense. The artist must provoke with his or her ideas and not simply for the sake of provoking. The artist must not ask what the future will think of the society that produces this art but state boldly that this is a product of that society, and at no other time in history could this have been created.

This is why Crank: High Voltage is one of the most important American films of recent memory. In just about 90 minutes, it manages to hold a fun house mirror up to our society and the freakish image reflecting back is grotesque and distorted but nevertheless, we can clearly make ourselves out in it. It is a satire of the highest order; it's all of the hopes, fears and desires we thought we tucked safely away covered in thick layer of sexism and racism, topped off with a nihilist cherry. Chayefsky would be proud if he could manage to keep his gorge from rising at the sight of it.

At first glance, Crank: High Voltage looks like the product of a love child between Baz Luhrmann and late-period Tony Scott, raised on a strict diet of Looney Tunes, first-person shooters and hardcore pornography. Hard as it is to imagine, writers/directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor take giant leaps and bounds past the first Crank, in which Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) is given a poison with no antidote and must keep his adrenaline at astronomical levels in order to stay alive. High Voltage picks up mere seconds after the end of the first film, in which Chelios falls from a helicopter to a presumed fate that I think even the most skeptical of viewers never believed was quite final. A Triad gang arrives within seconds and literally scoops him up off the pavement with a shovel. He comes to on an operating table to find that his heart has been replaced with an electrically powered artificial one and that his manhood is next on the chopping block.

"Fuck that," he grumbles as he begins his spree of death and destruction (both physical and psychological) in an effort to find his "strawberry tart" (heart, for those not versed in Cockney rhyming slang). Along the way, he finds cause to shove the business end of a shotgun up... well, the business end of a man, wantonly hack limbs off the patrons of a brothel, have sex with his girlfriend (Amy Smart) on a horseracing track, and a lot more that I can't even get into without putting in chapter breaks; all the while, he has to recharge his heart by any means necessary, whether that means sticking his finger into a car cigarette lighter, clamping jumper cables to his nipples, or grabbing a transformer with both hands.

And that, really, is all you need to know about the plot.

This film would be nothing if not for the prevalence of schadenfreude in our contemporary culture. From The Gong Show and America's Funniest Home Videos to Jackass and Simon Cowell's biting comments on American Idol, we are triggered to laugh at and even thrill to the pain of others. It's further heightened for us when that pain causes someone to achieve above their normal level: the protestant work ethic in action. By the time we see Chelios fight off the advances of a seemingly schizophrenic (and septic) prostitute, played by Bai Ling, the audience hopes he does take his chances with her... just to see what would happen to him. Many of us won't admit it, even to ourselves, but most of us would opt to be as indestructible as Chelios is, even at the cost of frequent and intense self-flagellation. We laugh but, secretly, we wish that we could be him.

In fact, those little moments are put in there to remind us that Chelios is us. To paraphrase The Dark Knight, he is the anti-hero we deserve, equal parts Batman and Joker. Though British, Chelios represents the white American alpha male as he sees himself: a tough, can-do guy who is nevertheless resented by the world around him. Every time he gets one step closer to achieving his goals, or at least snaps a few necks, someone is left barely alive to utter, "Fuck you, Chelios!" It's also no accident that his main adversaries here are Chinese and Mexican (paging Lou Dobbs) or that he's looking for something which has been stolen from him. Furthermore, the treatment of women by virtually every man in the film is so aggressively sexist - women are depicted as either sex dolls, target dummies or both* - that Neveldine and Taylor could only be pushing the point to show that, in Chelios' Gotham of L.A., there are no innocents. Dare I ask if it's possible that Chelios might be a modern-day Travis Bickle?!

Both Crank films take their cues from the video game industry - High Voltage comes as close to a live-action entry in the Grand Theft Auto game franchise as any film possibly could - and the pacing of this film, mistaken for catering to the attention-deficient, actually challenges its audience's patience. By offering us quick cuts, zooms and pans, as well as a few asides that defy both conventional storytelling and logic, Neveldine and Taylor dare you to keep up. Or to want to keep up for that matter. Inside this borderline contempt for the audience lies the unmistakeable virtue of Crank: High Voltage. If in the coming centuries we don't regress to the point of being dumb apes looking quizzically at a tapir's jawbone, future historians might find in it the first successful attempt to fully capture not what it is to live in this crazy world at this crazy time in human history but how it feels.




*Though for the record, it depicts all men as homicidal maniacs, sexual deviants, target dummies, or all three.