Action films, in particular, generally suffer the most when they try to honor this received wisdom. There are a few notable examples of successfully well-rounded actions movies, with Die Hard as the perennial example. Most of the time action filmmakers who try to give their movie a conventional grounding in character end up sucking the life out of their project. That's because creating textured characters with maturing relationships is really, really hard. It's hard to do in any movie. Great screenwriters and directors fail all the time to develop these kind of dynamics in their work. How much harder is it when you're dealing in a genre that is by its very nature a glorified explosion delivery mechanism for thrill-seeking audience members. Most action films are conceived as a series of jaw-dropping special effects set pieces or a high-concept plot, with an small army of nameless script monkeys brought in at the last minute to whip up some character arcs. Some critics think that the awful results of such a process demand that action filmmakers spend more time and energy developing their characters than thinking of things to blow up creatively. Those people fail to see the fact that, in most action movies, character development and realism are unnecessary and counterproductive. A great example would be last year's failed attempt to relaunch The Punisher as a franchise. Punisher: War Zone featured some phenomenally creative and outrageous blood-letting, including Ray Stevenson's Punisher punching through a guy's face and shooting another guy's face clean off with a shotgun while at the same time holding a small child in his arms! Unfortunately, these wicked gimmicks were sandwiched between interminable and painfully awkward scenes of the Punisher questioning his mission and bonding with the same small child he was holding when he shot that one dude's face off. If the lazy certitudes of Screenwriting 101 didn't demand such gestures towards a laughably half-assed idea of 'depth,' Punisher: War Zone would have been a non-stop hoot.
Action is the most visceral and visually-oriented of genres, and the urge to watch an action film is usually the urge to slake some primitive desire to vicariously witness uncanny acts of violence. Now, the above mentioned critics would argue that action sequences only have impact if the audiences cares about the people suffering through them, and to an extent that may be true. In a run-of-the-mill action film without visual flair or any real kinetic ambition, character development is the only way to make the proceedings palatable. But if the action kicks enough ass, if the filmmaker is willing to discard notions of physical probability, good taste and basic human decency, then no one is going to care whether or not a scrappy orphan teaches the main character how to love again.
No action auteurs understand this fact more than the brain trust behind the budding Crank franchise, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. They have buried the putrid corpse of film propriety, creating a Frankenstein's monster of excess and depravity that challenges the audience to follow them into a candy-coated hellscape of cartoonish ultraviolence, all done with a winking self awareness that never gets in the way of a good cranial explosion or cattle prod to the nads. In the process, Neveldine and Taylor have shown the way to a new action film aesthetic where "over-the-top" is just the beginning.
When we last left Jason Statham's Chev Chelios, he had fallen thousands of feet from a helicopter onto the hood of a car in LA, a deadly Chinese poison overtaking his organs. That's where Crank 2 picks up, with a van full of Triad hoods pulling up to Chev's body, scrapping him off the road with a snow shovel, and driving off with his body. Underworld doctors remove his supercharged heart for transplant into a big shot gangster and replace it with a temporary artificial heart to keep him alive while they harvest the rest of his organs. When Chev wakes up and finds out that the next organ on the agenda for removal is his wedding tackle, he commences an hour and a half of nonstop ass-kicking. In order to keep his artificial heart charged, Chev needs to repeatedly zap himself with any electrical current he can find, from tazers, dog training collars and jumper cables, all while trying to find his pumper. You know Crank 2 is going to bring the awesome as soon as the guy with the snow shovel shows up; in a film devoted entirely to topping itself in outrageousness with each new scene, the key to keeping things from becoming monotonous is a keen attention to detail, and at each turn Neveldine and Taylor consistently make the most surprising, outrageous and wickedly clever choices.
From the snow shovel road-peel to a shotgun enema to Corey Haim rocking a world-class mullet, Crank 2 leaves a breadcrumb trail of delightful, audacious coolness-nuggets strewn across the action film landscape. Diminishing returns are usually inevitable in a movie that tries to top itself with every scene, but Crank 2 succeeds by actually topping itself in every scene. You like the scene in the first Crank when Statham has sex with his girlfriend Amy Smart in front of a restaurant full of people? Crank 2 features Staham and Smart having sex on a race track in front of thousands of cheering spectators. As soon as you think that Jason Statham wailing on dudes might start getting old, Neveldine and Taylor stage the next fight as a Toho Studios showdown, complete with a rubber monster Jason Statham and exploding electrical towers. All the while, Jason Statham shows why he is the undisputed king of two-fisted action; his glowering mug radiates world weariness, casual confidence and bottomless rage. This stuff practically demands that you burst out laughing, but not because it's dumb, like the flying bus in Swordfish, but for all the best reasons; because it's surprising, its smart, and it kicks all kinds of ass. Tolstoy's fellow Russian Vladimir Nabokov wrote, "Nothing is more exhilarating than Philistine vulgarity." It's good to finally see action filmmakers who've taken that undeniable truth to heart.
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