Keep Cranking

Crank 2: High Voltage begins where Crank leaves off: with Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) dead on the road, having fallen from a helicopter. Or is he dead? Maybe he just blinked. Suddenly (nothing in this series happens gradually), a van pulls up, and loads Chev up. He is taken to an underground clinic (in a massage parlour?), where his heart is removed and replaced with an artificial model.

It seems that an elderly Chinese crime boss, Poon Dong (David Carradine) needed a heart transplant, and Chev did survive the Chinese poison of the first movie. He will be kept alive so that other organs (below the belt, hint, hint) can be harvested. Of course, he breaks free. Of course, his artificial battery pack runs down. Of course, he can recharge it through:

• Jumper cables from a car battery
• Body friction from public sex
• Getting tasered
• And so forth

And so he starts the search for his heart so that his faithful scrip doctor (Dwight Yoakum) can re-install it. We get mayhem, strippers, pornstars, racial insensitivity, more mayhem, public sex, and so on.

My favorite bit has Chev and his nemesis in black-and-white, with Rondo Hatton acromegaly facial prostheses battling each other as colossal beasts in a power substation - sweet tribute to The Brute Man and War of the Colossal Beast.

Really, I don't know why I bothered to review this. If you liked Crank, I expect you'll like this too.