One of the greatest travesties of modern action cinema is that the demented adventures of Jason Statham’s Chev Chelios drew to a close in 2009’s Crank: High Voltage, despite occasional sequel chatter cropping up in the 13 years since the wondrously unhinged second installment emerged to flip the bird at convention.
Even though the giddily bizarre and utterly off-the-wall duology combined to earn $77 million at the box office on total production costs of only $32 million, before generating upwards of $50 million in home video sales to turn the property into a hugely lucrative enterprise, nobody’s seen fit to dust off the batsh*t saga for a third go-round, and it’s a crying shame.
Nevertheless, the bananas Crank and its even more bonkers follow-up have endured as a pair of certifiable cult classics among genre junkies, and it’s High Voltage that’s been giving the streaming charts a shock to the system this week. Per FlixPatrol, Starz subscribers can’t get enough of watching Statham power his replacement heart through any electrical means necessary as he seeks to reclaim his own stolen ticker, and why wouldn’t they?
Come for the dizzying camerawork and offbeat asides, stay for watching the leading man go full-blown Godzilla as he takes on a kaiju criminal wearing a crude approximation of his own face. It’s weird, wild, wacky, and goddamned delightful from start to finish. Statham has voiced his desires for a threequel every now and again, and we’ll refuse to give up hope that the low cost and high reward model will one day see Crank rise from the cinematic grave it was placed in far too early.