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defrogComing this week to a theatre (or possibly video store/Netflix queue) near you: Crank 2: High Voltage.
Red-banded (a.k.a. NSFW) trailer follows:
I completely own up to being a fan of Jason Statham. Like most action stars, he can’t act to save his life, but like most action stars, he isn’t required to, and UNlike most action stars, he has a British accent. Which means he can get away with movies like this.
There’s an endearing honesty to the Neveldine/Taylor formula of filmmaking. I could go on about how they’ve basically harnessed the essence of savage, raw unfiltered teenage testosterone stripped free of all civilizing elements, set it in Los Angeles and given it a rap-metal soundtrack. But they’re too unpretentious for that.
They’ve pretty much realized that low-budget action film fans really only want one thing: buckets and buckets of fast-paced insane violence (preferably in the form of Jason Statham repeatedly kicking someone in the face until he dies or tells Jason where the McGuffin is and THEN dies) that only stops long enough to show young big-breasted women naked for no reason whatsoever. Low-budget action film fans will never admit this in public. But it’s true.
That doesn’t mean you can just slap together 90 minutes worth of randon mayhem and call it a movie. But it does mean that once you’ve selected the basic motivation for the action (i.e. giant robots are attacking the city, terrorists have taken over a high-rise, liberal hippies have made Chuck Norris angry, etc), the details can be as OTT as you like.
And if yr going the OTT route anyway, why not go all the way with it? Why not make a movie about a guy who falls a mile out of helicopter, survives, has his heart stolen by organ harvesters and replaced with an artificial one that needs to be recharged every hour? And then he wakes up in the middle of the operation, beats the shit out of the surgeons and then stomps off to get his heart back from the fuckers that stole it? And all via a script (apparently) unshackled by bothersome trivalities like basic research on the physical properties of electricity and its effects on the human body? Oh, and with Dwight Yoakum as the doctor giving Jason Statham medical advice?
I wish someone had a video of THAT pitch meeting. I hope they put it on the DVD.
Okay. I might be overselling it a little. After all, I haven’t actually SEEN Crank 2, and while the first Crank pretty much followed the fuck-it-OTT formula, there is the Law Of Diminishing Returns to contend with. So the trailer may be all you need to see.
On the other hand, did I mention Jason Statham has a Brit accent?
Speaking of which, I have a request of Hollywood:
Form now on, whenever Jason Statham is in a leading role, the character he plays must be named “Jason Statham”. Because let’s be honest here: it won’t affect the movie’s believability one bit. And it’d be great.
A bit of the old ultraviolence,
This is dF
Red-banded (a.k.a. NSFW) trailer follows:
I completely own up to being a fan of Jason Statham. Like most action stars, he can’t act to save his life, but like most action stars, he isn’t required to, and UNlike most action stars, he has a British accent. Which means he can get away with movies like this.
There’s an endearing honesty to the Neveldine/Taylor formula of filmmaking. I could go on about how they’ve basically harnessed the essence of savage, raw unfiltered teenage testosterone stripped free of all civilizing elements, set it in Los Angeles and given it a rap-metal soundtrack. But they’re too unpretentious for that.
They’ve pretty much realized that low-budget action film fans really only want one thing: buckets and buckets of fast-paced insane violence (preferably in the form of Jason Statham repeatedly kicking someone in the face until he dies or tells Jason where the McGuffin is and THEN dies) that only stops long enough to show young big-breasted women naked for no reason whatsoever. Low-budget action film fans will never admit this in public. But it’s true.
That doesn’t mean you can just slap together 90 minutes worth of randon mayhem and call it a movie. But it does mean that once you’ve selected the basic motivation for the action (i.e. giant robots are attacking the city, terrorists have taken over a high-rise, liberal hippies have made Chuck Norris angry, etc), the details can be as OTT as you like.
And if yr going the OTT route anyway, why not go all the way with it? Why not make a movie about a guy who falls a mile out of helicopter, survives, has his heart stolen by organ harvesters and replaced with an artificial one that needs to be recharged every hour? And then he wakes up in the middle of the operation, beats the shit out of the surgeons and then stomps off to get his heart back from the fuckers that stole it? And all via a script (apparently) unshackled by bothersome trivalities like basic research on the physical properties of electricity and its effects on the human body? Oh, and with Dwight Yoakum as the doctor giving Jason Statham medical advice?
I wish someone had a video of THAT pitch meeting. I hope they put it on the DVD.
Okay. I might be overselling it a little. After all, I haven’t actually SEEN Crank 2, and while the first Crank pretty much followed the fuck-it-OTT formula, there is the Law Of Diminishing Returns to contend with. So the trailer may be all you need to see.
On the other hand, did I mention Jason Statham has a Brit accent?
Speaking of which, I have a request of Hollywood:
Form now on, whenever Jason Statham is in a leading role, the character he plays must be named “Jason Statham”. Because let’s be honest here: it won’t affect the movie’s believability one bit. And it’d be great.
A bit of the old ultraviolence,
This is dF
