Crank: High Voltage (2009)

I like to listen to podcasts on my way to work and one of them is “How Did This Get Made” which deals with bad movies. I like bad movies, either because they are funny or because there is a big fascination with, well, how they got made and ended up so bad. The podcast is often funny, so I don’t want to miss out and slowly watch all the bad movies they talk about. Which is a bit masochistic I guess.

(spoilers ahead but really, don't do this to yourself, don't watch the movie)

Which leads me to this one. I’ve naturally seen a lot of bad movies because of that podcast and Crank 2 is one of the worst of these and of all time for me. Everything comes together here. It’s terribly made, has no real plot, the acting is awful and the content is simply disgusting.

• The movie might be one of the misogynistic movies I’ve ever seen. Misogyny is the hatred or strong disrespect for women. In this movie women are either prostitutes, strippers, crazy or simply victims, sometimes they are more than one, like crazy prostitutes or stripping victims. Also, almost all of them are at least semi-naked and the amount of t&a-close-ups is staggering. It’s amazing that movies which try to actually deal with sexuality often get the NC-17 rating while a movie that so gratuitously exploits women gets away with it. Women are beaten here, ran over by cars, burned (okay, that’s the same woman, which doesn’t make it better), slapped on their butts (all the time), expose their breasts aggressively and have to act sexually throughout the movie. When two women sit in the back of a car, one of them immediately tries to make out with the other one for no reason. There is a porn star demonstration (don’t ask), supposedly because they want more money. The male porn stars threaten the female protagonist with rape, the female stars squeeze their breasts on the car window. Amy Smart has to walk through the movie half-naked most of the time and the sex scene between her and Jason Statham is wrong in so many ways. It tries to top the similar scene in the first movie (which wasn’t a good scene in the first place, but at least the movie was somewhat good) but here it’s just filthy.
• The movie is just degrading to humans in general. I complained about that for Man of Steel but this goes beyond that. People are constantly dehumanized with violence in this movie. People are killed and injured for no reason and the hero of the movie has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. He kills people all the time and he doesn’t care about any lives lost. One of the first scenes shows him pushing a shotgun up someone’s butt and that sets the tone for the movie. I guess it’s supposed to be funny but it’s just gross and embarrassing. The guy is also fat which shows another degrading aspect of the movie, making fun of minorities. Asians are mostly crazy in this movie: Bai Ling as Ria is completely insane and speaks broken English which is then subtitled in broken English. Ha ha. David Carradine plays Poon Dong (again, ha ha) who looks ridiculous and is extremely sexist. There are some comments on Asians that are clearly racist. The Latinos are also all crazy and extremely violent. As far as I understand it, black people in this movie are all gay, meaning they hang out in their gay club, wearing leather and using white people as toys. The only real white people are the two protagonists who are also unlikable but in comparison to everyone else easily come away the best. Let's not even talk about "The Epileptic/Full Body Tourette" character. I know the movie supposedly does everything "tongue-in-cheek" but this is one of those instances where it seems more an excuse to make racist jokes. There is a scene in which a character from the first movie talks about his traumatic experience of almost being killed. The movie makes it clear that he will be killed soon too, but until that happens the scene goes on for so extremely long, just for the “money shot” of him having his brains blown out for no reason. The scene includes his female psychiatrist who heals him by arousing his sexuality. When she sees him killed, she throws up on the camera. Ugh, I fucking hate this movie.

This is not everything that’s wrong with the movie but most of what I think is just morally wrong with it. I know I might come across as arrogant or boring here but this movie has no redeeming value and instead emphasizes stereotypes and sells them as jokes. It is an ugly, offensive, repulsive movie that makes the world just a little bit worse. And who really needs that?