Tear my heart out, don’t need it anymore.
[SPOILERS ABOUND FOR CRANK AND CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE.]
I hated Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor’s spastic avant-action flick Crank the first time I saw it, and I have no idea why. I suspect I merely wasn’t in the right frame of mind, since a second look reveals this to be in essence a film made by two guys who somehow have a direct line to the dank recesses of my reptilian subconscious. All my previously registered grievances - it’s tasteless, overcaffinated, mean, thuggish, racist, sexist, homophobic - still hold; it’s just that they don’t matter. Of course it’s morally dubious. So’s most of the films I watch for fun. My complaining about a movie being overly misanthropic is like Jonathan Rosenbaum complaining about a film being too leftist or Armond White complaining about a film being too Spielberg. Plus, Jason Statham is a right magnetic bastard, and the craft is really fairly impressive; what struck me earlier as heedless quick-cut nonsense seemed a fairly sophisticated and entirely appropriate reflection of the main character’s dilemma. This last note only gets ramped up to insane levels with the sequel Crank: High Voltage, which may be one of the five most legitimately psychotic films I’ve seen come under a major-studio imprint. High Voltage is like the original film’s malicious, roided-up doppleganger - not so much a follow-up as an inflated revamp that implicitly uses said repetition to mock the tendency of sequels to offer the-same-but-more (the narrative’s cheeky introduction of two long-lost brothers to characters killed in the first film, one of who is a twin brother, can only be a sidelong joke at the absurdity of such a convention). It’s really rather thrilling watching these two guys chew through every idea they have just to keep good-sport Statham dangerous and moving.
But there’s something else underneath the flash and noise and equal-opportunity offense, something that originally peeks out in the final moments of the first film. If you really care to dig into it, the two Crank films taken together create a parable about a fundamentally decent man gradually losing his soul to the consuming power of violence. I don’t mean his code of ethics or morals - I mean his literal Soul, the thing that goes to Heaven when you’re good and Hell when you’re not. (This seems to be an ongoing concern for Neveldine/Taylor; Pathology, written but not directed by them, plays out this theme on a smaller scale.) The narrative arc that carries through the two films is touched off by a Faustian bargain wherein Chev Chelios, deadly assassin, intimidating hardass and secret nice guy, spares marked Korean mafia bigwig Don Kim’s life in exchange for a couple of days to set his affairs in order and disappear with sweet stoner girlfriend Eve (Amy Smart, never more appealing). The murder game is not one that lets you out easily, though, and Chelios finds himself dosed with a deadly poison by cocksure Ricky Verona. Chelios must then rampage through L.A., causing mayhem and tearing the town apart to find Verona and/or an antidote before his heart stops. To keep himself alive, he has to jump feet first back into the moral morass from which he meant to extract himself; every murder, every fist in the face, every drug consumed and perversion indulged as a life-saving maneuver taints his soul and pushes him a little further away from his humanity. The turning point is when Eve, formerly ignorant of Chev’s true occupation, crows, “My boyfriend kills people!” to a hostile sweatshop manager; when her initial revulsion over Chev being a hitman and not a computer programmer turns to pride, Chev loses his last connection to a sane world. He’s stuck in this evil world until he perishes… which he promptly does at the end of Crank, falling out of a helicopter.
Except that he doesn’t. The last thing we hear in Crank is the faint but audible beat of his ridiculously durable heart. So naturally, that’s what gets removed in High Voltage. The sequel is where it all goes bad and the Devil comes to collect his prize. Chelios has been literally rendered heartless, with a dodgy artificial heart providing a weak simulacrum of life to his hurtling torpedo of a body. If the first Crank was about Chev trying to stay alive so as to get out of the game, High Voltage is about him trying to get his heart back and, presumably, salvage his soul. The world around him is increasingly evil and decadent; one could make the case that the L.A. of High Voltage is, in fact, Chelios’s Hell. Even the spots of light that shone through the muck in the first film have been perverted by the all-consuming damnation Chelios drags along beside him, as evinced by Eve having become a stripper and Don Kim, Chev’s savior at the first film’s climax, being the engine behind the removal of his heart. After a certain point, Chev’s humanity is unrecoverable, yet he carries on, propelled by insanity and the winds of fate towards a total sociopathic conversion. He finally gets his heart back post-credits, but it’s too late… he’s longer recognizable as Chev or even as a person, having been set on fire from an extra-huge shock during the climax. Yes, it’s true: not only does Chev Chelios briefly transform into a Godzilla (in the film’s most lunatically inspired bit), but he becomes a fucking fiery demon from Hell at the end of High Voltage. Check the arc: Crank ends with a sincere declaration of love from a man beyond saving, and the sequel takes a similarly outsized romantic gesture and turns it toxic by revealing it as a hallucination of the maddened Chev. He thinks he’s reunited in holy perfection with his Eve, but instead all he’s done is set an unfortunate crack whore on fire with his blazing embrace. The last image in the film proper is a grinning, flaming Chev, more Satan than man, shooting the finger to the camera. That’s not a fuck you to the audience, it’s to all of mankind. Chev Chelios is no longer one of us.
