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Crank – High Voltage: High Style, Low Content

OK, who’s the funny bloke who told me to stick my tongue to this thing?

Rating: 3 out of 10

“Just go in, shut your brain off and watch the pretty colors.” I’ve used this statement many times before to friends of mine who might take a film too seriously: I was incredibly prepared to follow my own advice while walking into this inevitable sequel. The original movie, Crank, ends in a fashion defying anything resembling logic. By the closing moments in that film you’ve left logic sitting at a bus stop forty miles out of town, lonely and holding an empty popcorn tub. You could say that Crank: High Voltage doesn’t disappoint in faithfully keeping the trend going, but then again, it all depends on what you find disappointing.

Crank: High Voltage begins three months after the final moment of the first film. Our fearless anti-hero, Chev Chelios, has his miraculously still beating heart harvested and replaced with an artificial one that only runs with the constant intake of electricity. Chev wakes up before the rest of him is picked apart and goes on a multi-million volt tirade in search of the people behind his involuntary organ donorship. Banding together once again with the strangest people in the underworld of Los Angeles, Chev unleashes constant mayhem on all who stand in his way.

Coming from a long standing love of brainless action films (Demolition Man, Showdown in Little Tokyo and Gymkata, just to name a few), I am one of the first to jump up for something that barely resembles a plot and takes in no consideration for performances or tone as long as the action is true and holds together. This one tiny thing is something co-directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor seemingly did not know how to do. These two loudly broke down the walls of Hollywood with the original Crank and many regarded them as the new, fresh faces of the indie-action genre. Yet the failure here is that beyond the inclusion of 8-bit video game graphics, there is nothing new to their style. Crank: High Voltage pulsates off the screen like a mixture of Guy Ritchie (circa Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), Danny Boyle (circa Trainspotting) and a massive overdose of Adderall. The whole thing ends up as a collage of scenes strung together by the running thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if this happened here?” I’m usually a big fan of that question, but only when this next question is successfully answered: “But does it make any sense at all?” Strident, frenetic and unapologetically overdone, this movie only shows what a freshman student filmmaker could do with a little cash and some famous friends.

Jason Statham, reprising his role as the unstoppable Chelios, shows up and does what is required of him, but unfortunately that’s not much. He gives the stare, gets beat and tortured mercilessly, then breaks through everything with pure rage. He’s the main draw for this because without a doubt he is the most underrated action star on screen today. He is also the action genre’s version of Samuel L. Jackson, who will do just about any movie attached to a paycheck. The only difference is Statham is not getting offered the big budget flicks that will elevate him to where he deserves to be. Many actors get to a point when they do one studio film for the check and one indie film for the credit, but Statham seems to be hovering on a see-saw of bad versus good choices. He stunned people in his debut in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, followed nicely by Snatch (see the Guy Ritchie connection forming?), but just as he was riding the wave of stardom up the action movie totem pole, he starred in The One, his first pairing with legendary kung-fu icon, Jet Li, which left a lot to be desired. Their second time out together in War tumbled even farther down the hole. Statham also followed his bank account to the set of In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, directed by the infamous Uwe Boll, where Statham was a random Renaissance-era farmer who just happened to know martial arts. Yet, on the other side of the resume, keeping people interested was a handful of stand out performances in The Italian Job, The Bank Job (no relation) and the original Transporter (the franchise has slipped a bit in quality since then). I’m still keeping my hopes up for his upcoming projects: 13, The Brazilian Job (this one actually is related) and the Sylvester Stallone directed uber-explosion flick, The Expendables. Statham is better than this particular franchise and I look forward to him getting to prove it.

Now, not that these types of movies really get a whole lot of acting critiquing going on, I can’t let this go without mentioning the painfully terrible visual caricature of Bai Ling. Bordering on offensive, her turn as a hooker who gets psychotically attached to Statham brought groans from all over the audience. She trots over the line between comical and tragically bad taste in a pair of trampy stiletto heels. I can’t add anything positive under the realm of Amy Smart (who plays Chev’s girlfriend, Eve) or any of the random cameos that litter this movie. The only person who actually gets away with a believable character is Dwight Yoakam as the brilliant and depraved friend-cum-heart surgeon. The filmmakers actually gained a point for having his character laughably stop himself halfway through the picture while telling Chev, “You should be dead already. Doesn’t matter. Anyway…” It was a nice admission from behind the silver screen that they knew none of this really worked as a story of any value, instead relying on my old turn of phrase, “Just go in, shut your brain off and watch the pretty colors.”.

Recommendation: The main failure here is that the whole film is one big joke, but it felt like the filmmakers weren’t letting anyone else in on it. It’s more like something made by a bunch of friends who all made each other laugh on set without ever thinking if it would work on anyone else. Watch at home while drinking, but not if you have any history of epileptic seizures.

The Wrestler: Love Letter from the Top Rope

This is definitely going to hurt me more than it does you.

Rating: 8.5 out of 10

I still can still see myself, sitting on that brown tattered couch in the living room, wondering how much change has found its way into the holes in those old cushions. I held the remote control in my tiny hand and flipped constantly, trying to battle the onslaught of commercials for break-dancing tutorial videos and Nancy Reagan pleading for me to “Just Say No”. Very few things would make the flipping stop or could make me endure the advertising interruptions, and for many years the chief among those was none other than professional wrestling. What many people refer to as a fake sport is in reality nothing different than live theater specializing in acrobatics, fight choreography and mythological storytelling. These men, and now many women, personify the characteristics of good vs. evil, right vs. wrong and heart vs. strength. It may be dramatically simplified, but what goes on inside the squared circle week after week is at its core morality embodied by living, breathing warriors.

The Wrestler is the story of one such warrior, Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson. He once was at the top of the mountain and idolized by legions of fans around the world, but twenty years have passed since those days in the bright, bright spotlight and now the crowds have thinned and the venues have fallen farther away from the stadiums of his past. The effects of the constant battery to his body, from drinking, drugs and the matches themselves, have left Randy in a fight for his own livelihood. With a broken relationship with his daughter and a spark fluttering between him and a local stripper named Cassidy, he has to make a choice if the “real” world away from the cheers and jeers is worth losing the “fake” world inside the ring.

Directed and produced by Darren Aronofsky, The Wrestler is much more than a raw tale of a broken man. This is a love letter to the stars of today and those of the past inside the wrestling world, known to many as “sports entertainment”. The film describes with painful acuity the reality of life behind the curtain and away from the crowds. The players behind the mythic characters deal with physical pain on an almost constant basis; bones broken, necks sprained, skin shredded. And on rare and terrible occasions, lives are lost in pursuit of giving the fans one more big pop. In crafting the fictional tale of Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson, Darren let audiences who might not ever watch a regular professional wrestling match in their life take a peek into how much dedication and passion these people have for the entertainment which so many people choose to write off as silly and childish. The film is shot honestly with a good deal of handheld camerawork, giving it a subliminal sense of documentary feel. It also jumps around somewhat, skipping beats of time, but that only lends more to the impression that the camera has been around this collapsing goliath for hours and hours on end, searching for those windows into his thoughts.

To get into the soul of a person, many say you have to go through the eyes and this pair happens to belong to the enigmatic Mickey Rourke. Like Sly Stallone enveloping the beef pounding fury of Rocky, Rourke silently struggles with the aching for some sort of connection and the stubborn pull of the spotlight, even as dim as it has gotten for him. It truly will go down as one of the most inspired casting decisions of this year. Rourke was a boxer for a number of years and was four fights away from a major title fight when his doctor told him to quit due to major neurological damage he had already sustained. This wasn’t the role he was born to play, it was the role he was beaten into playing beautifully. Who knows how many of the other story points in Randy’s life mirror those in Rourke’s, but very few people can disappear into a character the way Rourke does here. In recent years, I would say Heath Ledger was the only other person I have seen able to accomplish this feat on a regular basis. Holding strong on either side of this tragically pure performance were Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood. Tomei plays the aforementioned stripper, Cassidy, who also has to keep the line straight between a world of fantasy and the real world back home with her nine-year-old boy and a driver’s license under the name Pam. She lets go in a major way and dives deep into the pool of necessity to show where Cassidy comes from and why she does what she does. Wood plays Randy’s daughter Stephanie, who has been estranged from him for an unknown period of time. She only gets a small handful of scenes, but two of those rarities prove to be the best in the entire film. Wood has rarely strayed from the emotionally tortured characters, especially after her intensely powerful turn at sixteen-years-old in the indie drama, Thirteen. She is now the “it” girl for edgy and troubled young female roles, but we’ll have to wait and see if she can parlay that into playing those same women when she gets older.

In the end what Aronofsky made is a dedication to all those people who live behind their masks and the trials and tribulations they suffer through to make someone else’s day just a little bit better. It’s not wholly selfless; they all get paid for the masks they wear, but to many the money becomes secondary to the rush of the outside world stepping into their carefully crafted fantasy.

Recommendation: For the wrestling fans out there, this is a must see. It truly serves as a validation of your viewership to each and every pay-per-view match. For the rest of the audience, the strength of Rourke’s performance might just make you think a little next time you flip by the WWE on Saturday morning (that’s the World Wrestling Entertainment for those even farther outside the know).

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