CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE: Jason Statham cannot be killed!!!

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/04/2009 (6354 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When a movie doesn’t screen in advance of its opening date, we take the time to judge the proverbial book by its cover — or, in this case, the film by its trailer:

The premise: Chev Chelios (Jason Statham), the energizer bunny of action heroes (h e can EVEN return from the dead), is back. This time a Chinese mobster has stolen his heart and replaced it with a battery-powered ticker that needs regular feeds of high-voltage electricity — as well as, if the trailer is any indication, a lot of dead people, strippers, Chinese gangsters and bikini-clad women shooting machine guns — to keep it pumping. Who knew medical science could be so titillating and utterly, senselessly violent?

Trailer talk: "Just juice me." Spoken with determined, alpha male venom by a pectoral-muscle bearing Statham as he connects car jumper cables to one nipple and another to his tongue in order to charge up his heart. What’s that you say?… Yes, I wish I was kidding, too.

The cast: Remember the movie Speed (1994), in which a monosyllabic Keanu Reeves had to keep a bus going 50 miles per hour to keep it from blowing up? Replace Reeves with Statham (just ante up the seediness, facial stubble and snarl factor), replace the bus with Statham’s heart, and replace squeaky clean, good-girl romantic interest Sandra Bullock with tawdry, lap-dance giving Amy Smart and the two films are pretty much one and the same. Oh, and Crank adds an assortment of baddies bearing tattoos, handlebar moustaches and bikinis (just once I’d like to see a villain with all three).

Bottom line: Among the many ways our hero stays "charged" include plunging a finger into a car lighter, throwing his hands into an exposed box at a high-voltage power tower, and grinding against an old women to produce static electricity ("He treated me like his hot little whore" she later tells a newscaster). If you can suspend your disbelief and sense of decency, and generally enjoy mayhem and stuff blowing up "real good," this movie will entertain you to no end. By the way, the film’s ACTUAL website warns against "frenetic strong bloody violence throughout." When violence gets three adjectives, you know it means business.

— Canwest News Service

 

For Randall King’s review of Crank: High Voltage, pick up tomorrow’s paper.

 

MovieTrailerReview

Crank: High Voltage

"Starring Jason Statham

"Kildonan Place, St. Vital, Towne,

Polo Park

18A

3 out of five stars