Crank: High Voltage

Speaking of classical leading men, it seemed appropriate to follow up a Vin Diesel movie with one starring one of my other favorite contemporary actors, Jason Statham.

Along the lines of the last post, Statham's bona fides as classical were on full view in last falls Transporter 3, where he refuses to be seduced by his passenger, a beautiful young Russian woman whom he has been hired to deliver to the other side of Europe.

As in the case of Diesel, we accept his behavior because we assume that he (or rather his characters) can have any woman they want. If, say, Matthew Perry had pushed the beautiful Russian woman away, audiences would be highly puzzled.

I suppose it is incorrect to call Diesel and Statham "classical heroes." Really they are antiheroes, of course, which serves to illustrate that in movies at least, to be classical is now to be an outcast and a renegade of some form. Gary Cooper would play bank robbers, if he were alive today.

I've been falling down on the job as far as seeing all the "prequels" to current releases, and thus I hadn't seen Crank (2006). But they are both by the same writer/director pair (Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor), so I can only assume that stylistically they must be very much the same.

That being said, I figured out the gag to Crank: High Voltage within a couple minutes. I had expected it to be a dark noir tale---the indestructible Chev Chelios (Statham) is dropped from a helicopter, kidnapped and has his heart removed and replaced by an artificial one, a device designed only to keep him alive until his other organs (including his penis) are harvested for transplant by a Chinese gangster. The (anti)hero has a very short time to relocate his original heart, to have it replaced in his body.

But this is not a dark noir story. One look at the poster, which shows Statham as Chelios hooking up a battery cable to his tongue, should give you an idea of what the movie is really about.

Rather it's a live-action cartoon---absurd, frenetic, fast, and furious (ooops, wrong movie again). At one point, the movie slips into an open parody of (or homage to) the Godzilla movies.

All of this made me like the movie a lot. About twenty minutes into it, I began to debate with myself whether or not this movie was a surrealist masterpiece in disguise.

What makes it so brilliant is that in its absurdity, it creates a contemporary Los Angeles that is the hyper-amplification of the Postmodern Gutter. Everyone in the movie, including the antihero, are grotesque caricatures of the sins and deformities of contemporary America. It is Californication on steroids. All the characters seem as if they taking are either too many drugs, or too few of their meds. They twitch, lurch, and roil uncontrollably at each other.

Perhaps the most indicative scene in the film is when Statham and his girlfriend, after having stolen a police cruiser, are mobbed on the street by a massive picket of porno actors, carrying signs that say "No Dough, No Blow," and such other humorous one-liners. In that moment, the film seemed to be almost the perfect movie of our time, capturing the essence of what America is about right now.

Later the movie rises to a crescendo in a scene at the Hollywood race track that is described by a newscaster within in the film (John De Lancie!) as "an open air porno."

Chelios is hypersexed, but he spends half the movie pushing a way a prostitute who keeps trying to jump his bones. But in the strip club shoot up scene, he indulges his blonde girlfriend with a kiss, and later shags her in front of thousands of people at the race track. Does this make him unclassical, because he diverts from mission for some nookie? Of course, not. She's his true love, you see. Besides, he needed the friction to recharge his heart battery.

This movie is certainly not in the taste of most people I know, but I have a suspicion that folks will be watching both Crank movies decades into the future as a camp window into the Gutter World of 2009, and how far the world spun off its axis during the Great Meltdown. Well, I hope they are still watching movies a couple decades from now.