Crank: High Voltage (2009)

Beneath the crudity and sexism of the Crank film series lies a metaphorical elegance most viewers miss. In the first film, gangsters poison Jason Statham's Chev Chelios. To keep his body alive, he needs to keep giving himself boosts of adrenaline. Many recognized the debt the first Crank owed to violent video games but they failed to notice how Chelios' ailment and his resultant compulsion for excitement perfectly mirrors the dynamic between fanatic and filmmaker within the world of exploitation action films. In a B-movie, boredom is the ultimate enemy and in Crank creators Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor invented a hero for whom boredom literally equals death. If Chelios doesn't entertain us, he's a goner.

With Crank: High Voltage, Chelios is very much alive and well. But while Neveldine/Taylor (as they're credited onscreen) have seemingly created a simple carbon copy of their first film's story – Jason Statham runs wild through the grimy backstreets and seedy underworld of Los Angeles –their entire mission statement, not to mention that ingenious gimmick, has changed significantly. This time around, gangsters steal Chelios' heart and to keep his artificial replacement pumping, he needs to keep giving himself shocks of electricity. Appropriately, then, if Crank was all about keeping its audience excited, High Voltage is all about keeping its audience shocked.

This means the movie is as much an entertainment as a full-on assault: on the audience’s expectations, on cinematic convention, on traditional moviemaking technique, and especially political correctness. There are a lot of jokes in bad tastes, and a few racial and sexual epithets that I certainly don’t approve of. And that’s the point. In a way, that old lady you've seen Statham dry hump in the trailer (in order to create some static electricity and keep himself juiced) and her horrified reaction to his lewd behavior (“He treated me like his hot little whore!”) is the onscreen representation of the voice (hopefully) inside all of us telling us what we’re are witnessing is wrong, wrong, wrong. If you’re horrified by what you’re witnessing, then High Voltage has accomplished its mission.

But even if you don’t care for Neveldine/Taylor’s crude sense of humor, the film’s worth a look for their audacious directorial style. The pair – who are their own camera operators – shot the film on consumer grade digital cameras, freeing them up to experiment with outlandish angles and and rigs (they even developed one that works along the same principle as The Matrix’s Bullet Time contraption, except it only weighs about 50 pounds and Statham can run in it). Because their camera of choice is so cheap to replace, they’re not afraid to imperil it– like, say, by dangling it off the back of a speeding motorcycle – which leads to delightfully unhinged stunt photography.

Their impressive camerawork, which applies a skater video mentality to chase sequences, is blended together with split-screens, still-frames, animation, even a spoof of a Godzilla movie. It looks, sounds, and moves like nothing else in movie theaters and it's bursting with unpredictability. Even though I'd seen the first Crank, thought I knew what to expect from round 2, I was continually surprised by High Voltage. How many sequels can you say that about? How many movies period?

High Voltage may be one giant revelry of juvenilia, crudity, and smut but it is one made free of compromise. It is goofy and silly, exhilarating and glorious. And, most importantly, it's totally shocking.

Taken (2008)

Grateful that the stultifying awards season is coming to a close, I took in Taken, the latest piece of action gimmickry from the Luc Besson factory. No whiff of Oscar-bait on this one, but possibly some mothballs. Originally released last February in France, it made its way through Europe and South America (variously titled 96 Hours, Venganza, and Busqueda Implacable) before landing in the U.S. last month (the DVD is already available at Amazon UK, in the phallic "Extended Harder Cut").

A briskly paced bit of vengeance, Taken stumbles with its shoddily edited fight scenes and Besson's penchant for sappy sentiment - without Jason Statham's bemused wit to undercut it. Neeson plays a retired spook forced back into action when his daughter is kidnapped by some Albanian sex traffickers. Revenge, rescue, etc. Director Pierre Morel is tasked with turning Neeson into a fearsome warrior, and his solution is dipping into the Bourne bag of tricks, creating force through multiple edits rather than visible punches. No battle lasts longer than a few seconds as Neeson tears through these thug straw men, with none of the improvisation of the Bourne films, in which every household item can be turned into a weapon. Here it's a flurry of impressionistic cuts, a shot of a snapped neck, and onward. There's never a sense of danger here. Neeson is a CIA superman, but Besson also adds a dash of extraodinary rendition and torture, but not enough to completely question his heroic stature. It's all a little queasy and muddled, much like The Dark Knight.

It's a shame, because Morel and Besson's influential District B13 (2004) was premised on impossible physical feats, in the parkour style imitated in the Bond films (especially the opening sequence of Casino Royale). There he captured every death-defying maneuver. Here saddled with the expressive but physically limited Neeson, he opts for sub-Bourne montage.

So while I'm still enamored with Besson's action-film factory, with his emphasis on simplicity, pace, and lucid action, they're not all winners. I sympathize with Armond White's rave, but demur when he urges that Besson win the Irving G. Thalberg award.

Maybe I'll be convinced if there's a Transporter 4. Especially if they put Cory Yuen back in the director's chair instead of his rotating roster of French hacks (Louis Leterrier, Olivier Megaton). But that's another story for another time.

The Bank Job (2008)

Modesty!  The Bank Job has it in spades.  Content to spin its convoluted yarn with good-natured efficacy, it doesn't bog itself down with backstory or THEMES, but rather transmits its begrimed characters' hopes and dreams through a glance that lasts a beat too long or a touch that presses a millimeter too deep.  So the meat of the film is in the faces, specifically Jason Statham's and Saffron Burrows',  who otherwise scamper about with the speed appropriate to a big time heist.  But then they cast a glance, a glance first charged with sex and then with suspicion with a splash of death.  These glances take up maybe 5 minutes of the film's 1 hour and 50 minute run time.  

There's plenty of decent heisting set-pieces, filmed with workmanlike efficiency by Roger Donaldson, but nothing too flashy.  It's a film that feels like a job of work, as John Ford was fond of saying, but a job that employs great craftsmen who almost cover up the seams of the creaky material (but not entirely).  It has its dull moments in the cliched aftermath of the robbery, but then Saffron's lashes and Statham's bullet-shaped skull engage in a minuet of longing and retreat, which make me overrate this diverting piece of work - so here I am, overrating it.  It's a treat.