The 2000s were an incredible, if often ridiculous, decade for action movies. The Bourne Identity helped kick things off in 2002. Kill Bill went back to the ‘70s to help define the decade’s visual style. Then, in 2011, The Raid closed out a great decade. We’re still feeling each film’s impact to this day.
We don’t talk quite as much about the 2000s’ action-as-absurdity streak. Movies like Shoot ‘Em Up, Hot Fuzz and Kung Fu Hustle combined high-stakes action with comedy that started as slapstick and often ventured into the surreal. If you want an action movie that’s gleefully, violently stupid, however, accept no substitutes.
2006’s Crank and its sequel Crank: High Voltage are two of the dumbest action movies you will ever see, and this is meant as the highest compliment possible. In retrospect, they might have actively redefined the concept of the dumb action movie for the 21st century. If you love action movies and you haven’t seen either Crank, you’ve got to give them a watch, especially while they’re available for free on Pluto TV.
In the original Crank, Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) is a Los Angeles-based hitman working for a crime family. In a double-cross, his rival Verona injects Chelios with a slow-acting poison that kills its victims by inhibiting their adrenaline production. The plan was to give Chelios just enough time to live so he could hear Verona gloat.
Instead, Chelios takes off on a rampage across Los Angeles. His first stop is a mob doctor (country singer Dwight Yoakam, of all people), who tells Chelios that he can stay alive by keeping his adrenaline up. Otherwise, he’ll die before he can get revenge.
By the time Crank came out, Statham was two movies deep in the Transporter series, so much of his film persona had already been established. At first, Crank feels like another entry in Statham’s early action resume, with Statham as the relentlessly stoic eye of the storm. The further it goes, however, the more it descends/elevates into self-parody.
Chev Chelios might be the closest direct cinematic equivalent to a Grand Theft Auto protagonist. Once Crank gets off the ground, Chelios is forced to steal every stimulant he can find, pick fights with cops, injure himself, and drive across Los Angeles like an absolute maniac. He soaks up punishment like a cartoon character, all to keep himself just this side of the grave.
That dark sense of humor makes up a lot of what separates Crank from a dozen other 2000s action movies. It has a few good laughs, and Statham makes the most of playing a kill-crazed maniac who’s mostly Red Bull at any given time.
The rest comes from Crank‘s unique visual design. The directors, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, did double duty as Crank‘s camera operators, and filmed many of its sequences while they were rollerblading. It’s not the “shakycam” trend that’s often thought to have characterized this era of filmmaking thanks to The Bourne Identity‘s influence. Instead, Crank is shot like an amateur skateboarding video.
Source: IMDB
Source: IMDB
Crank: High Voltage ups that particular ante by being filmed entirely on consumer-grade camcorders. It’s a 95-minute episode of America’s Deadliest Home Videos, as Chelios wakes up on an organ harvester’s table, minus his damaged heart.
Chelios then has an artificial heart wedged into his chest that’s powered by an exterior battery pack. After he accidentally destroys the battery, that leaves him one hour before his heart stops, unless he regularly recharges it by any means necessary. If he wants to survive without having to regularly blast himself with a taser, Chelios must retrieve his heart from the Triad gang members who’ve stolen it.
The first Crank had a few token nods to realism. Crank: High Voltage does away with that in the first 15 minutes, when Chelios attaches jumper cables to his tongue to juice up his artificial heart. Soon, he’s fighting across LA with a new stripper sidekick (an unrecognizable Bai Ling, The Crow) and brief bursts of inexplicable strength. If the first Crank was GTA, the second is InFamous, as Chelios absolutely has electric super-powers in High Voltage.
Source: IMDB
If Crank was a cartoon, Crank 2 is a video game. The first 10 minutes already feel like a first-person shooter, and Neveldine and Taylor shoot some scene transitions like Final Fight, where the viewer pulls out to an aerial shot of one LA neighborhood and to another so the audience can track Chelios’s path of destruction. Physics are a suggestion, logic is a dream, and the shot-on-video footage gives every scene a weird uncanny-valley sheen. The guys who made Kane & Lynch 2 must’ve seen Crank: High Voltage maybe a hundred times each.
The first Crank is one of the best dumb action films of its era. The second is more of a historical anomaly, as it might be the ultimate example of what British censors used to call a “video nasty.”
High Voltage doubles down on every element of the first film: more gore, more violence, more nudity, cameo appearances by half the working porn stars in 2008 LA, and significantly less coherence. It’s a Troma movie with Jason Statham and an eight-digit shooting budget. It was made to be shown on the back wall of a metal concert. Just watching High Voltage by itself feels weird, like you’re doing it wrong, but it’s one of the most ridiculous experiences you can have at the movies.
It’s worth catching both Crank movies for the high price of free while they’re on PlutoTV. As long as you can turn your brain off for a while — and that cannot be emphasized enough — the Crank movies are a lot of fun.
