Night and day (and night again and day again)

So the bottom line is, we all survived the experience of my wife going away to a conference in Baltimore from Friday morning until Sunday evening. My wife of course missed her boys for the duration, but at least had the conference itself to occupy her mind most of the time, and the nice thing about missing people is that the problem solves itself immediately at the moment of reunion, which was certainly the case here. The little guy, for his part, asked for his mommy a few times over the course of the weekend but never came close to throwing a tantrum demanding that she show herself or anything like that. He also remained relatively injury-free (by which I mean relative to his own self-imposed rough and tumble standards, which of course means he did fall down a couple of steps on the back deck at one point, giving himself a little scrape/bump on the forehead, but again – relatively speaking it’s like he spent the weekend lounging in packing peanuts and bubble wrap).

Me, I was pretty damn tired by the time my wife got home on Sunday but that was mostly my own damn fault. Granted, keeping up with the little guy and keeping him happily amused so that he doesn’t antagonize the pets unnecessarily or bring large pieces of furniture crashing down on himself or incite countless or other calamities can be exhausting in and of itself. In theory (and in my own personal experience) one of the bests part about modern marriage and child-rearing is the unargued understanding that staying home with the kid(s) is not a slack job, and whosoever leaves the house to work in an office for several-odd hours might actually be the one getting a break, which means coming home from the office and claiming to be too tired to go into active parenting mode is a non-starter, because the homefront-holding partner has more than earned a respite, even if it’s five freaking minutes. The truly excellent thing about my domestic situation is that there are both a couple days a week where I ride in like the cavalry around dinner time, and a couple other days where she’s the one tagging in off the top turnbuckle. (So to speak.)

So not getting that just-you-wait-til-your-mother-gets-home-young-man buffer is a bit more trying, yes, not to mention that my wife usually has better sleep-lightly instincts allowing her to wake up at the slightest twitch of the little guy in the night, which means when she’s not home I don’t sleep well at all, waking up worried that I won’t wake up when something happens. But on top of all that, since I felt my wife’s absence not only in the pre-bedtime baby-wrangling workload but also in the post-wrangling hang-out time, I was left to my own devices for entertainment. On Saturday night, this amounted to a Netflix double-feature and Saturday Night Live.

The Netflix double-feature served a few purposes. One, it got me back on pace for my 2010 resolution to watch 12 Netflix movies this year (in order to justify my membership to the service). I watched a lone movie in January and another in February but never found time in March, so by checking off two in April I’m at least staying on the level. Two, the movies in question were ones I had really wanted to see - of course that probably goes without saying because I don’t generally request Netflix discs for movies I don’t care if I see or not - so perhaps I should say Two-Point-Five they were movies my wife had absolutely no interest in whatsoever, and I spared her the experience. And Three, by watching both back-to-back I was able to get the fullest experience of their combined effect.

The cinematic gems in question here, I should say, were Crank and Crank 2.


I like Jason Statham, and I like big dumb loud action flicks (as long as they are more comprehensible on a raw sensory-input-processing level than a Michael Bay eye-rape like Transformers) and I had heard enough good things about Crank and Crank 2 as BDLAF exemplars that I really was excited about watching them. There weren’t any surprises, really, with one possible exception: how different the sequel was to the original.

SPOILERS!

Crank has a good hook: a professional hitman (Chev Chelios, played by Statham) gets injected with “The Beijing Cocktail” and is being slowly poisoned to death by the adrenaline blockers in it which will eventually stop his heart. But if he can flood his system with more adrenaline than the poison can block, he can keep his heart beating and stay alive long enough to get revenge on the enemy who injected him. So this becomes a good excuse for Chelios to engage in all manner of risky stunts, the more dangerous the better to get his adrenaline pumping, while running nonstop to find his soon-to-be killer. In the end Chelios calls in a large favor which leads to two gangster armies shooting the holy hell out of each other, an attempted helicopter escape by the bad guy, and Chelios and the bad guy falling out of the helicopter. Chelios kills the baddie on the way down, then bounces off the hood of a car himself and his heart finally gives out.

So, the big stunts are all competently done, there’s a strong sense of pitch-black humor throughout, there’s some stylish direction, all in all It Does What It Says On The Tin. Obviously it requires a healthy amount of suspension of disbelief, but still. Goofball fun.

Crank 2 is also about Chelios, who we find out was immediately scraped off the street and brought back to a ganglord’s compound in order to be nursed back to health so that his organs could be harvested. Apparently the events of Crank 1 proved to the underworld that Chelios was some kind of superman and thus his organs are coveted by a 100-year-old Triad leader. Right at the outset of Crank 2 Chelios is down one heart, which has been replaced by an artificial heart only ever intended to keep him alive long enough to maintain viability for the other organs awaiting transplant. And then Chelios escapes the compound, with a dying battery pack for the artificial heart.

So whereas the plot-engine for Crank was to have Chelios keep stimulating his adrenal responses while hunting down his killer, the plot-engine for part 2 has Chelios constantly looking for literal sources of electricity to keep his artificial heart beating while he tries to find his real heart, because his buddy who is some kind of back-alley doctor can re-transplant it for him. The bigger the jolt, the more Chelios gets superpowers of speed and strength due to his artificial heart pumping faster and more powerfully. Yes, clearly at this point we have left “healthy amount of suspension of disbelief” far, far behind and are swimming in the deep end of Are You Fucking Kidding Me?!?! But, to its credit, the movie doesn’t take itself seriously and doesn’t expect the audience to, either.

It’s still a little jarring, though, because almost the entire cast comes back. Statham as Chelios, Amy Smart as his girlfriend (who is now a stripper, because that’s the kind of way the sequel tries to outdo the predecessor), Efren Ramirez as the twin brother of a character who died in part 1 (but now as some kind of avenging kung-fu MFer who also happens to have Full Body Tourettes), Dwight Yoakam as the doctor (truthfully one of the best parts of both movies put together), etc. So it feels like 2 should by all rights be the next chapter in the story, but ends up so different in tone that these two books wouldn’t even be sold in the same store (or whatever tortured metaphor you like). Crank is an implausible high concept in a well-done action movie. Crank 2 is a laugh-out-loud ridiculous low-concept in a totally bonkers movie that kept me glued to the screen just to see how audacious it would get. (The answer to that is, a scene in which Chelios fights Johnny Vang in a city power station and the sequence morphs into a Godzilla-esque homage with two actors duking it out in slow motion in a miniature model of a power station, both actors wearing rubber suits that look like caricatures of Chelios and Vang. Worth the price of admission right there, folks.)

Watching both movies back to back probably made the contrast even more glaring, but then again, a lot of the goodwill earned by part 1 carried over into part 2 and no doubt made me like it more than it deserved. I’m still not entirely sure to what extent Crank 2 is a knowing self-parody of cash-grab sequels, and to what extent it’s just a window into a truly disturbed mind that thinks having Jason Statham climb a power pole, throttle a transformer, get blown back down to the ground in the resulting explosion, then run around ON FIRE while dealing out holy pissed-off retribution is the most magnificent bit of bastardy ever committed to celluloid.

Maybe both?

I timed it pretty well so that my Crank double-feature ended as SNL was starting, and I enjoyed Tina Fey’s presence as host, which really should come as no surprise. I’m not quite sure why I hung in there until the very end, since a stone truism is that the last couple of sketches always suck, but I did. Damn the completist in me! Although if and when Crank 3 gets released I will probably have to give that inner completist a stern talking to about good uses of our time.