“Crank: High Voltage” delivers unapologetic energy and action

By BEN BURR

Indestructible anti-hero übermensch Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) wakes up to his organs being harvested. His supernaturally powerful heart has already been replaced with an ersatz electric ticker, but when the back-alley surgeons go for his trousers, he makes a break for it.

In the following 96 minutes, Chelios pursues his pilfered pumper, keeping his replacement charged by taking electrical shocks wherever he can find them.

“High Voltage,” like its predecessor “Crank” (2006), makes no attempts at integrity. Both were helmed by writer/director team Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor and are founded on a premise of premo B-movie schlock. Gratuitous and sensational; the film is deviously self-referential: stalking henchmen early in the film, Statham hums along with the score.

In the film, there is a decidedly video game-ish feel, another carry-over from the first film, evident in the first-person camera work and the extensive use of Google Maps (complete with scroll-bar) to convey location.

It is no surprise that Neveldine and Taylor’s next project, “Citizen Game,” will be “set in a future-world where humans can control other humans in mass-scale, multi-player online gaming environments…” But this is according to IMDB.com, which has recently suffered questions of unreliability.

“High Voltage” succeeds by throwing caution to the wind. Where 2005’s gory action movie “Doom,” based off the Windows computer game, relied heavily on plot to advance the film, “Crank” just presents non-stop, highly-edited, loud and flashy action. The violence is grotesque, the humor obscene and almost all the women are topless. As Chelios seeks his organ, he must endure electric shocks from various sources like a wet finger in a car cigarette-lighter.

Overall, the flick loses its oomph outside the theater. This kind of movie is best appreciated on a 40-foot screen with oppressively loud surround sound. Nuanced, it is not, but “Crank: High Voltage” has the market cornered for supercharged action.