Tagline: He was dead… But he got better.
Crank: High Voltage movie storyline. In the 2006 action hit Crank, hitman Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) spent twenty-four hours in over-drive: fighting, killing, and keeping his adrenaline flowing at full-force to combat a deadly poison injected into his body. Now, in the high-octane sequel Crank: High Voltage, Chev has managed to survive-and is about to face a brand new day.
Picking up immediately where the first movie left off, Crank: High Voltage finds Chev surviving the climactic plunge to his most certain death on the streets of Los Angeles, only to be kidnapped by a mysterious Chinese mobster. Three months later, Chev wakes up to discover his nearly indestructible heart has been surgically removed and replaced with a battery-operated ticker that requires regular jolts of electricity in order to work.
After a dangerous escape from his captors, Chev is on the run again, this time from the charismatic Mexican gang boss El Huron (Clifton Collins, Jr.), and the Chinese Triads, headed by the dangerous 100 year-old elder Poon Dong (David Carradine). Once again turning to Doc Miles for medical advice, receiving help from his friend Kaylo’s twin brother Venus (Efren Ramirez), and re-connecting with his girlfriend Eve (Amy Smart), who is no longer in the dark about what he does for a living, Chev is determined to get his real heart back and wreak vengeance on whoever stole it, embarking on an electrifying chase through Los Angeles where anything goes to stay alive.
Crank: High Voltage is a 2009 American black comedy action film and the sequel to Crank. The film was written and directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor and stars Jason Statham reprising his role as Chev Chelios. The story of the film resumes shortly after the first film left off, retaining a similar over-the-top premise and adding more special effects.
In the current film, the ex-hit man Chev Chelios finds out he must fight on his life once again as his true heart is transferred and he becomes equipped with an artificial heart, and he reveals he must get injected with electric shocks in order to stay alive and kill those who did it to him. Alongside Statham, the film also stars Dwight Yoakam, Bai Ling, Amy Smart who reprised her role as Eve, Efren Ramirez, Reno Wilson and Clifton Collins, Jr.
Resurrecting Chev
At the end of Crank, hitman Chev Chelios plummets from a helicopter, high above downtown Los Angeles, seemingly to his death. But when the film’s use of hugely innovative visual techniques and non-stop action turned it into a theatrical success and DVD smash, creators Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor became interested in the prospect of Chev Chelios living to see another day.
Taylor admits that at first he and Neveldine never expected to be so intimately involved with the sequel. “Originally we were just going to write Crank: High Voltage for someone else to direct,” Taylor says. “We were going to write it, produce it and move on to something else. But by the time the script was finished, we had fallen in love with it and we were not going to let anyone else touch it. We came back to Lakeshore and said, `We want to do it, we need to do it and nobody else can do it.’ So that’s how it happened. The script took on a life of its own.”
“With the first Crank, Mark and Brian just wanted it to be one of those films where the hero dies in the end and people can’t believe it,” notes producer Skip Williamson, who originally championed Neveldine and Taylor and brought them to Lakeshore. “They’re great writers so it was easy for them to come up with another idea for the second film. And with the sequel they just took it to the nth degree.”
“We didn’t want to cop out and have it be a flashback or have Chev’s falling out of the helicopter be a dream or a prequel,” Neveldine points out. “We wanted Crank: High Voltage to be a true sequel in that it starts where the last film left off. So literally the first shot in this film is the last shot in Crank, and we just keep going.”
As such, Crank: High Voltage begins with Chev hitting the asphalt of a busy downtown LA intersection, only to be kidnapped by a mysterious group of Asian gangsters. Three months later, Chev wakes up on an operating table, where a team of Chinese doctors have surgically removed his heart and replaced it with a battery-powered artificial device that needs to be charged regularly in order to keep him alive.
Producer David Rubin explains, “Once you buy into the notion that the hero may have lived, it opens up endless possibilities. Mark and Brian have a crazy sensibility and they bring to their work that insanity, and the script is evocative of that. Really, in terms of Crank, death is only a state of mind. As soon as someone says you can’t do something to Neveldine and Taylor, it’s immediately a dare to try and figure out how to do it. And not only how to do it, but to do it well.”
For Neveldine and Taylor the writing process proved to be much easier for Crank: High Voltage primarily because the characters and the world they inhabit had already been established.
According to Taylor, “When we wrote the original, we didn’t know that Jason Statham would be the guy, or that Amy Smart would be the girl, or about Efren or the other actors, so we were writing characters in the dark. Statham’s character in the first movie was an LA guy; we didn’t know he was going to be a Brit, but we couldn’t find the tough American badass we were looking for so we had to go across the pond. It was pretty cool in the second movie to be able to write dialogue specifically for Jason, stuff that we knew Jason could just kill. Same with all the other characters too.’
“It was like riding a bike downhill,” continues Taylor. “Everything was so easy because you knew exactly who you were dealing with. The actors knew the characters. We knew the characters. And we’re using lots of little colloquialisms and stuff Jason says just from knowing him as a guy — things we couldn’t have written in the first script.”
Neveldine says that despite the comedy, action and sex, all of which have been amped up in this new installment, the screenplay for the sequel rose from a relatively simple idea. “At its core,” Neveldine explains, “Crank: High Voltage is a story about a guy trying to find his heart. Isn’t everybody looking for their heart?”
In terms of making a sequel to CRANK, the studio and filmmakers knew that in order for it to work, there was no doubt that they needed the charm and menace that Jason Statham expertly brought to Chev Chelios in the first installment.
Statham, fresh off a busy trio of films – The Bank Job, Death Race and Transporter 3 – was thrilled to return to the physically demanding role of Chev Chelios. “I was in right from the suggestion of doing a part two,” Statham recalls. “There was an open-ended closure to the first film. If you look closely, you’ll see that there was a heartbeat and the blink of an eye. So it was really about whether Mark and Brian had the inspiration to go and make another one. It was always left open in their eyes.”
“We felt confident that if we were going to direct the movie, Jason would also want to do it,” Neveldine remembers. “When you’re writing a movie for a specific cast, you really hope that you can get the cast that you want, and when you’re writing a sequel, you need the original cast or most people probably won’t care.”
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Crank: High Voltage (2009)
Directed by: Mark Neveldine
Starring: Jason Statham, Amy Smart, Corey Haim, Bai Ling, Dwight Yoakam, Efren Ramirez, Simone Bargetze, Danna Hansen, Amy Taylor, Clifton Collins Jr, David Carradine, Holly Weber, Geri Horner
Screenplay by: Brian Taylor
Production Design by: Jerry Fleming
Cinematography by: Brandon Trost
Film Editing by: Marc Jakubowicz, Fernando Villena
Costume Design by: Dayna Pink
Set Decoration by: Betty Berberian
Art Direction by: Sebastian Schroeder
Music by: Mike Patton
MPAA Rating: R for frenetic strong bloody violence throughout, crude and graphic sexual content, nudity and pervasive language.
Distributed by: Lionsgate Films
Release Date: April 17, 2009
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