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Dom Robinson reviews

Crank 2: High Voltage

He was dead...But he got better.

Distributed by
Lions Gate Home Entertainment

Cover Blu-ray:
DVD:
Soundtrack:

Cover In the original Crank, Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) was poisoned and left having to keep his adrenaline levels up to stop the toxin from killing him. However, even after bumping off the bad guys he still didn't get any sort of treatment, much less an antidote, and the film ended with him having fallen out the sky, onto a car and bounced off into the road, just by the camera.

I'd never got round to watching the DVD I had of this for ages, so since I knew I'd be reviewing this title I got it out and watched it less than a week before viewing the sequel. And one thing sprang to mind in that Amy Smart, also here reprising her role as his girlfriend, Eve, was still hotter than the sun, although all she ever did in the original was to have sex with Statham in public.

Anyway, this film picks up from where that one left off... at which point, before the ambulance can get to him, Chelios is picked up by some men in a van and taken to an operating theatre where he's opened up by some dodgy Chinese surgeons and his heart is replaced with some bizarre mechanical alternative. However, they're not intending to do him any favours - they just want to carve him up for organs... starting with his privates - and he finds this out as he comes to, at which point he jumps to his feet and kicks ass to get out of there. He'll need to get his own heart back though because, as Doc Miles (Dwight Yoakam) confirms, the artificial ones are only meant to keep you alive for a couple of days while you await a transplant. Oh, and he shouldn't do anything strenuous, either!

Cover Chelios has got to keep his heart charged up to stop him from dying, and before long he loses his only advantage of a storage battery of some sort which gave him some extra juice to keep going... even though it was rather a crap battery anyway. Along the way, Eve turns up as a pole dancer - and sex rears its head again, Johnny Vang (Art Hsu) is the main baddie who our hero will need to sort out by the end of the film, and although Kaylo was dead by the end of the original film, along comes his brother, Venus (also played by Efren Ramirez), who has Full Body Tourettes...

David Carradine plays the elderly Poon Dong, whose relevance will be revealed along the way, but as Doc Miles tells him, "Confucius say - Karma's a bitch." - and it certainly was for Carradine whose game of autoerotic asphyxiation went way too far back in June this year...

The first film was a fair bit tighter than this, whereas this sequel's paper-thin plot is stretched out with an overlong sequence between Eve and her boss, Randy (Corey Haim, looking a fair bit different here!), as well as a young Chev on a Jeremy Kyle-style chat show, appearing alongside his mother (played by Geri Halliwell), all to the point where this makes you forget what was happening to the present-day Chev and it just drags during these times as they're non-essential and should've been included only as DVD extras. There's also the pointless inclusion of Ria - a tarty whore played by Bai Ling (below right) - and Venus.

Hence, while the first film was a decent 7/10, this sequel is a mediocre 5/10.

Cover Shot on video and with some bizarre effect applied to make the image look intentionally a little stilted, along with all manner of other weird pop video-style elements, the one sure thing is that the film is presented in a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen frame and it's as crisp and sharp as you'd expect a Blu-ray image to look, with outdoor scenes - and there's plenty of those - looking bright and colourful. For the record, I'm watching on a Panasonic 37" Plasma screen via a Samsung BD-P1500 Blu-ray player.

The sound is in DTS 5.1 and while there is a lot of gunfire, and some neat surround effects on occasion in other areas, there are better demo discs out there that have a number of defining moments within their films as everything rather mushes into one here.

The extras are as follows:

  • Making Crank 2 (51:23): I looked at the audio commentary first and if you read my description of that, further down, you'll see why it looked more like a 'making of' as that's basically what you get here. Lots of clips from the film with chat over the top of it from various cast and crew members - you know the drill with a 'making of' and big fans of this film will be pleased that this runs for over 50 mins.

  • Crank 2: Take 2 (4:03): People and items left in shot accidentally are highlighted in this short piece. I didn't spot any of them during the film, given the pace at which it runs.

  • Audio Commentary: from the two directors plus other crew members, and you can either watch it the traditional way or 'High Voltage' mode which shows the film in a small box while the rest of the screen is taken up with the various crew members and behind-the-scenes shots during the sections they're talking about. It's more like an extended 'making of' so that comes across really well as a result.

  • Remaining extras: At this point I'm going to throw this in here, as I'm at the end of my tether...

    I've no idea what was up with the check disc that arrived, but sometimes the menus and film and extras would appear, when selected. At other times I got a blank screen. It's not me, I know that, but something was up with it. Perhaps sometimes the menu structure shouldn't be overly fancy, then these problems won't occur? The main menu also takes forever to load up as a 'high voltage' sign appears and the meter going from green, to yellow, to red, takes so long to fill the last bit of the red bar that I thought the disc had stuck! Often, the only thing I could do was to switch the machine off and start it up again! I must've done this 12-15 times in the space of watching the film and getting this far with the extras.

    The remaining extras are a wrap party gag reel, trailer and something called 'MOLOG' which looks like some way of connecting to the internet to chat about movie stuff online. Umm... there's already Digital Spy and other forums for that so why would I try and do it through my keyboardless Blu-ray player?

    There's also some 'LG Live' stuff which connects your player via the internet to Twitter and Facebook so you can share with the world the films you've been watching... Not sure why exactly I'd do that, either, when I can just post links on there instead.

    Oh, hang on, I tried one more time and got the gag reel (3:26) to work, but then the menu went blank again. That's enough of that. I see from Amazon that others are having similar problems on other players. Can Lions Gate please explain just what they've done with this disc?

When the menu works, it's hi-energy music and busy images all mixing together. There are English subtitles but the chaptering could do with a few more as there's only 16 throughout the film.

FILM CONTENT
PICTURE QUALITY
SOUND QUALITY
EXTRAS


OVERALL

Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2009.

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