Make no mistake. This will be the single most ludicrous movie you have ever seen. If you’re offended by, well, just about anything, then this isn’t the film for you. The tagline itself should have told you all that you need to know: “He was dead. But he got better.” After you end a film with your main character falling about a mile out of the sky and landing on a parked car, that’s usually a good sign that there won’t be a sequel. For Neveldine and Taylor, it was more like an additional challenge. The fact that this film exists at all set the tone from the beginning, and once you let go of any remaining shreds of reality, you may just find yourself enjoying the ride. We don’t just mean shutting off your brain though. We mean unplugging it, ripping out the battery, and stomping on it.

I’m not even sure you can call what this is filmmaking. It’s more of a surrealist overload, assaulting your senses with an arsenal of noise and light that even the desensitized among us would have a hard time absorbing in a single sitting. Every shot has movement, every angle canted. The coloring alternates between blown out, supersaturated, and almost black and white. Visually, it would be an intense film even if it was a national geographic wildlife special. Add in car chases, fistfights, gratuitous nudity, blood and gore, explosions, and excessive amounts of every lewd or vulgar thing you can imagine, and you start to approach the level of utter absurdism these guys are creating. Throw in Jason Statham to guide the audience on their merry way, and we might as well be living a video game. Even the title sequence is done in a classic 8-bit palette, evoking a whole new level of off-the-wall artistic intent.

What really makes the film work though is the editing. The way the scenes are put together out of countless of hours of handheld footage is pretty remarkable, and the rhythm of the hilarious musical cues only adds to the bizarre perspective on reality. The build up for each moment is timed out almost too exactingly, and there are areas where we could’ve stood to have gotten a bit of a reprieve, a breather in the midst of all the chaos. That’s not the kind of movie this is though, and sure enough, every time we’re in a situation long enough for it to potentially start to drag, we blast off to the next obstacle, the next plot point, and the next brutal scenario which pits our invincible hero up against the worst that humanity has to offer. You don’t mess with Chev Chelios. He doesn’t stop when he’s dead.

You can only have one of two reactions to the film. You can be disgusted, distraught, horrified, and at a loss for

hope in humanity and movies in general. Or you can embrace it for all of the lines that it crosses, all the barriers it leaps, and all the social constructs it throws in your face in the service of a good time at the cinema. I tend towards the second option, mostly because I feel some level of pride in our culture that a film like this one can be made in spite of the FCC, in spite of the MPAA, and in spite of the censorship of overprotective parent groups and other non-entities looking for their 15 minutes of fame. We are living in a world where there are no longer any borders, any fences, any checks or balances about what’s appropriate or what’s acceptable. Some would call that the de-evolution of our society, I think it may very well be the next big step. We’re tearing down what’s come before not as an act of destruction, but as an act of revolution. We’ve taken away the limitations and can look for the possibilities that are out there waiting to be explored. Do I think Crank: High Voltage has anything to do with such high-minded psychoanalytical pursuits? Of course not. But if nothing else, it really does make you wonder…