Crank
From Tv Tropes
- "Fuck you, Chelios!"
A hitman named Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) has been injected with a slow-acting poison that will eventually cause his body to shut down. His doctor is far away and had the flight delayed. If he runs out of adrenaline, he will die.
Crank is a 2006 action film where Jason Statham kicks everyone's ass. Followed by a sequel, Crank: High Voltage, in 2009. After the events of the first film, Chev pursues his heart, which has been literally stolen by Chinese gangsters. He must electrocute himself to charge his artificial heart and prevent himself from dying. Hilarity Ensues.
Crank provides examples of:
- Action Girl: Eve has a moment of this in the sequel.
- Actor Allusion: One of the characters comments that Chev looks like "that guy from the Transporter movies". That's because he is.
- Adrenaline Time.
- All Girls Want Bad Boys.
- Anti Hero - Chelios is a dick.
- Apathetic Citizens: Construction workers, after watching two guys fight Godzilla/Frankenstein-style, in a complete deapan tone: "Maybe we better call 911". Generally, few uninvolved citizens are phased by most of the shit Chelios does.
- Asian Gal With White Guy: Throughout High Voltage Bai Ling's character (Ria) is determined to fulfill this trope after Chev accidentally saves her from a bad guy. Chev's lack of interest in her doesn't seem to matter.
- "He my Kevin Costner!"
- Ass Shove: Crosses into Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique at the beginning of Crank 2: High Voltage.
- Attack Of The 50 Foot Whatever.
- Auto Erotica.
- Back From The Dead: Chelios in the second movie. Several people openly comment on this.
- Back Alley Doctor: Dwight Yoakum's character. In the second movie he mentions losing his license in association with his ex-wife's botched vaginal rejuvenation surgery.
- Backup Twin: Venus in High Voltage.
- BadAss: Chev. Not surprising, since he's Jason Statham.
- Bald Of Awesome: Chev. Not surprising, since he's ... ah, you know.
- Big Damn Heroes: At the end of the second movie, an army of transsexuals called in by Venus and strippers by the Asian hooker save his ass.
- Big Lipped Alligator Moment: The power station fight in the second movie, which turns into a kaiju parody with caricatures of the two combatants.
- When Venus first meets Bai Ling's character, she throws a tantrum, and his full body Tourettes' starts acting up. Cue twitch dance off.
- To a certain extent, the entirety of the second movie, which is much more violent and comedic than the first.
- In the climax of the first film, Chev randomly bleats like a goat.
- Bilingual Bonus: Chelios means in some languages "bald(y)".
- Black Comedy: The second movie is entirely made out of this and intentionally offensive stereotypes.
- Breaking The Fourth Wall: A scene in the first movie has Chev reading the on-screen subtitles. In the second movie, he gives a middle finger to the audience during the ending.
- Breast Attack: A prostitute is shot in the breasts, though it only causes her implants to leak.
- Bulletproof Human Shield: In Crank, Chev Chelios uses his friend's dead body as a shield.
- And in High Voltage, in a limousine where everyone's shooting at him with machine guns, he uses a Mook as a shield. Naturally, he comes out unscaved.
- Butter Side Down.
- Callback: The first time Chev points his finger like a gun at someone's head and a bullethole appears, it had been planned out beforehand. When it happens again in the sequel, he stares at his hand with an expression that clearly says 'What the hell? It's happening on its own now?'
- The Cameo:
- Chester Bennington shows up a few times.
- Ron Jeremy and a whole group of porn stars in the second movie.
- Lloyd Kaufman
- Maynard James Keenan
- Geri Halliwell (formerly known as Ginger Spice).
- John de Lancie
- Camera Abuse.
- Car Cushion: One appears where... Chelios falls on it.
- Career Killers: Chelios' job.
- Cluster F Bomb: FUCK YOU, CHELIOS! Even turns into a montage in the middle of the sequel.
- Combat Pragmatist: Chev prefers to simply beat everyone to death if he isn't in direct possession of a gun.
- He also takes pretty much every gun off of everyone he kills. Any time he kills someone with a better or just plain different gun, he picks it up and uses it to kill the next guy.
- Contract On The Hitman: Inverted: Columbian employers hire him to assassinate a Chinese mob boss, and they want to use him as the scapegoat. The twist is that he didn't kill the Chinese guy, who is appropriately grateful.
- Crosses The Line Twice: Especially noticeable in Crank: High Voltage. Violence against women: Bad. Stripper getting shot in her breast implants, which then ooze out and deflate while she cries: Hilarious.
- There are A LOT of Asian stereotypes, especially in the second film. Then again, it is the late David Carradine...
- Crowning Moment Of Awesome: The whole thing. No, really. Justified. It's a plot point.
- "Hey, doll. Looks like I let you down again..."
- Chev Chelios is a man who, while completely on fire, will throw the man he's fighting into a pool. Then walk away.
- And after he's walked away he gives a melting middle finger to the audience!
- Chev's doctor and his girlfriend successfully kidnapping Poon Dong and extracting his heart.
- Crowning Moment Of Funny: "Why'd you stop?" "What, so you can fall asleep like you always do?"
- "I'm ALIIIIIIVE!"
- Then he dies.
- "Many Triads would give the hearts from their own breasts to save Poon Dong. Not me though, fuck that, but many."
- "You killed my brother mother fucker, prepare to die."
- The entire epinephrine scene, which begins with Chelios running down the street screaming, wearing only a hospital gown, while British speed metal plays in the background.
- "I'm ALIIIIIIVE!"
- Crouching Moron Hidden Badass: Venus. "You killed my brother, motherfucker. Prepare to die."
- Depraved Bisexual: The Chinese prostitute. She has no compulsion touching Eve's naked body, who takes it relatively well.
- Designated Hero: Chelios is an exceptionally violent, uncaring individual established to be a mob hitman and he will generally wreck anyone's day at the slightest excuse. The only real reason he's established as the good guy with any clarity is that everyone else is even worse.
- It does help that he apparently lives in a Crapsack World that's like a Hollywood-ized Jhonen Vasquez creation.
- Determinator: Chelios is the living embodiment of determination. He not only displays new levels of Badassery with absolutely every move he does, he does it while poison is slowly killing his body or when his heart has been taken out.
- Digital Bikini: A lightly censored version had this on an originally topless masseuse.
- Dirty Old Man: Poon Dong.
- Disposable Sex Worker: Played with in High Voltage: Chev (unintentionally) saves Ria from becoming one.
- Played a bit more straight in the final battle: an army of prostitutes called by Ria and Venus gun down the various mooks, including a few hapless naked women and some of the prostitutes themselves.
- A few strippers also die in the second action scene.
- Doomed Protagonist: Subverted to hell and back.
- Deus Sex Machina: In both movies, his problems can be solved momentarily by screwing or rubbing on little old ladies.
- Enfant Terrible: Chez in his
- Eureka Moment: Early in the first movie, Chev remembers how his heart felt better when smashed the tv and sped in his car (raising his adrenaline).
- Eve has one in the second movie, complete with a graphic of a lightbulb appearing next to her head.
- Fanservice: The movie basically pushes the R rating as absolutely far as it will go, in terms of nudity and sex as well as profanity and violence.
- Finger Gun: The first time Chev points his finger like a gun at someone's head and a bullethole appears, it had been planned out beforehand. When it happens again in the sequel, he stares at his hand with an expression that clearly says 'What the hell? It's happening on its own now?'
- Flipping The Bird: To the audience, no less.
- Free Fall Fight: End of Crank.
- Fun With Subtitles.
- Gorn.
- Groin Attack: Several.
- Hand Cannon: The number of Desert Eagles used in High Voltage is close to insane.
- Hassle Free Hotwire: Justified: Chelios is a child delinquent turned hitman.
- Hilarious Outtakes: at the end of the second movie.
- Statham: I take it you're the faggot who's been hunting me all day?... (reads line) I'm sorry, the Ferret...
- Hilarity Ensues: While the first movie is relatively sane, the second one is so ridiculously over the top that it qualifies as comedy gold.
- Holy Shit Quotient.
- Hollywood Action Hero.
- Homage: The whole series is basically one long video game.
- Honey Trap: Chocolate to catch the Chinese with the heart.
- Humiliation Conga: While Chev is already a Butt Monkey for most of what he goes through, each movie tends to contain at least one segment where he has to stop being badass for awhile and just do some flat-out embarrassing things to stay alive.
- Horse Jump: Chev Chelios and Eve are having sex on the trackfield to create static electricity for his ensured living, a horse jumps over them and Eve and the viewers get to view a horse-dong.
- I Got Better: Chelios, in the second movie. One of the taglines is actually "He was dead... but he got better"
- Ironic Echo: "Experiencing a little twenty-twenty hindsight right about now, ain't ya?"
- I Am Not Shazam: No, Jason Statham does not play a guy named Crank. Apparently nobody else does...
- Incendiary Exponent: Chelios at the end of the second film. The current rush takes him so high that he hardly feels it for over a minute.
- It's Not Rape If You Enjoyed It: His girlfriend wasn't exactly willing with the public sex at first... and promptly developed a fetish for it in the second movie.
- It's Personal: Parodied with the transsexual's brother in the second movie. The Ferret's motivations are these too.
- Jerkass: Chev Chelios, in both movies - although occasional, fairly feeble attempts are made at portraying him as a Jerk With A Heart Of Gold, he seems by turns either genuinely uncaring or vaguely amused by much of the havoc he causes.
- To make up for it, pretty much everyone he's up against also embodies this trope.
- It's also thoroughly lampshaded in the second movie with a huge segment of "Fuck you, Chelios!" flashbacks going all the way back to his childhood, in which he's on a Maury-like show getting yelled at for being a little shit.
- Jumping On A Grenade: One of the bad guys in the first movie uses his bodyguard to save himself from the blast. The bodyguard sees this as an honor, maybe because he didn't notice the grenade and probably thought his boss pushed him down to keep him from becoming a bullet sponge.
- Kavorka Man: Chev's doctor is an old man with a hot girlfriend.
- She's (they're?) implied to be hookers, or at least kept girls. He is, after all, the mob's doctor.
- Kinda Busy Here honey, you know, dying.
- Knight In Shining Armor: High Voltage: Ria mistakes Chev as hers, says as much, and immediately developes a full-blown BodyguardCrush on him.
- "You need me like Whitney Houston!"
- The Last Dance.
- Living On Borrowed Time.
- Look Ma I Am On TV: A guy flaunt Eve's panties to the camera.
- Losing Your Head/Brain In A Jar: Ricky Verona.
- Lost In Translation: The Mook with the shotgun stuck up his ass is supremely confused when Chev asks what happened to his "Strawberry tart".
- Lyrical Dissonance: REO Speedwagon's "Keep On Loving You" is played in High Voltage as Chelios literally burns to a crisp.
- MacGuffin: Johnny Vang's red cooler in High Voltage until we find out it doesn't actually hold Chelios' heart and instead has something so disturbing that Chev looks at Johnny and says sincerely, "I am shocked to my core. You've got some deep problems, motherfucker."
- Made Of Iron: Chev Chelios, in both movies.
- In the second movie, it is explicitly stated that his nigh-indestructability is the reason why various people are interested in his organs. More specifically, one very special one...
- And the Chinese prostitute, who gets hit by a car and survives.
- The Man Behind the Curtain: The man who stole Chellios' heart (and whom narrative convention would suggest is the Big Bad) is the legendary leader of the Chinese Triads, played by David Carradine. About 2/3rds of the way through the film he's revealed to be a wizened Dirty Old Man who has about 2 minutes of screen-time and is promptly and anticlimactically lured to his death by two odious comic relief characters. The film's real "Big Bad" is a completely unrelated, entirely different character who seemingly comes out of nowhere in the final reel.
- Man On Fire: Chev, at the end of the second movie.
- Memetic Badass: Chev appears to be one of these in-universe, to judge from the other characters' reactions to him. On the down side, that's exactly the reason why the Triads stole his heart in the first place.
- Mistaken for Terrorist: Inverted by Chev Chelios getting revenge on an obnoxious taxi driver by dragging him out of his vehicle, then pointing at him and yelling "Al Qaeda!" Everyone in the street immediately dogpiles the man and beats him up.
- MST3K Mantra: Invoked in-universe in the beginning of the second film. A news reporter (de Lancie) comments on the implausibility of someone falling from the sky randomly being "bullshit". His words.
- No One Could Survive That: Arguably the endings of both movies. The fact that Ricky Verona survived... um, sort of probably counts less.
- Now It's My Turn: In the sequel - Chev's electric heart starts running out when a bunch of cops hogpile on him... then one of them brings out a stun gun.
- One Man Army: About 5 seconds after entering a whore house full of gangsters, every last one is tossed out a window or through a wall where a window isn't available.
- One Scene Wonder: David Carradine as Poon Dong.
- Organ Theft: Well, at least they planned to...
- Painting The Fourth Wall: The elevator scene near the end of the first movie.
- Pet The Dog: Chev's behavior toward Eve, his girlfriend and arguably the doctor.
- Phrase Catcher: "Fuck you, Chelios!"
- Poisonous Friend: Chelios is described as this by a cop detaining Eve. Her response? "I don't think you fell out of a plane and lived...
- Practical Effects: Many scenes that would normally be done with special effects are in-camera, including the dramatic finale where Chev Chelios and Verona are falling thousands of feet out of a helicopter.
- Product Placement: Of all things, the heart. Chev's artificial heart is an actual thing, and they used the real name and company. They changed it up a bit for the movie, obviously (the real one doesn't have external batteries, but does have recharger ports), but the fact that it survives all the crap Chev puts it through and comes out whole at the end could be considered the ultimate (albeit heavily fictionalized) endorsement.
- The ambulance medic Squeeing around it helped a bit.
- Psycho Psychologist: A mild version of this. She seems to pleasure herself in front of her patient while Mind Screwing him (though for his own good). Ends in Shoot The Shaggy Dog moment for him.
- Raging Stiffie: Chev Chelios gets "a steel hardon" after taking too much epinephrine.
- Rape as Comedy: Chev, who will die without an adrenaline rush, sexually assaults his girlfriend in broad daylight on a crowded public street. She screams and tries unsuccessfully to fight him off; they gather a mixed-gender crowd that watches but doesn't try to help her in any way. Then — naturally — she decides she wants it half-way through.
- Rasputinian Death: Chelios... twice.
- Rated M For Manly: As a review on Cracked puts it: "If you piled all the guns in the world on one side of a room and Crank on the other, Crank would still be the manliest thing in the room."
- Refuge In Audacity: Mostly the second film.
- Revolvers Are Just Better.
- Rule Of Cool: Very, very little in either film makes any sense, or has any kind of genuine believability. Fortunately, it doesn't need any, either.
- Sequel Escalation: Hell yeah!
- Sequel Hook: In the first movie, where Chelios opens his eyes after seemingly have died for the eleventieth time, and in the second movie, where he does it again]].
- Shoot The Shaggy Dog: The first movie is presented as this, but subverts it in the second. Played straight with one guy Chev ruined his life, who was close to remaking his life and gets hit by a stray bullet from a firefight involving the same Chelios.
- Shout Out: There's a random giant rubber monster movie segment at one point in High Voltage. Chelios' rubber mask is also remiscent of Frankenstein.
- Show Within a Show: Though the old lady calls me Trainsportor, so it's probably something similar to Transporter, with a similar actor.
- Sociopathic Hero.
- Special Effects Failure/Conspicuous CG: Ricky Verona's head in the tank.
- And shout-out in the Attack Of The 50 Foot Whatever scene.
- Talking Is A Free Action: Chelios falls out of a helicopter (at what looked like a relatively low altitude), has a fight to the death, and still has time to pull out his phone, connect to an answering machine, wait through the message, leave one of his own, and hang up. This dubs as Tear Jerker, but the second movie makes it clear nothing was audible because of the wind, which would have made Chelios' story much more tragic if he would've died.
- A Taste Of The Lash: The Ferret gives this to Chelios (complete with views of whip marks) in his depraved plan of vengeance.
- Tourettes Shitcock Syndrome: Averted in the second movie. Venus has "full body Tourettes", which causes him to go into full-body spasmodic convulsions, but actually swears significantly less than Chelios, who is just a JerkAss jerk.
- Trading Card Lame: Fight Klub includes Chelios between the fighters.
- Unreliable Narrator: The creators mention in the commentary for the first film that everything that happens after Chev drinks the "plant shit" drug may not have actually happened, at least not the way the viewer sees it.
- The Unreveal: "What kind of sick freak carries something like that around in a box?"
- Unsettling Gender Reveal: Again from the bloopers:
- Unusual Euphemism: The DVD version has a "Family Friendly Audio" feature that replaces all the spoken swears (even minor ones like "damn") with tame versions. However, the full unedited video is still present, so the movie starts by showing a DVD with the words "FUCK YOU" written on it, in which the villain talks about how he "just freakin' killed you" with "synthetic Chinese stuff".
- Vomit Indiscretion Shot.
- What A Drag: Chelios gets a boad drag just For The Evulz while he's transported to one of his enemies.
- What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made On Drugs?
- Whodunnit To Me: Tehnically a subversion, as Chelios doesn't need to figure out who poisoned him, as the culprit leaves him a gloating video that admits and even shows the act. Rather, he needs to track him down for revenge and possibly the antidote.
- Why Won't You Die?
- Willing Suspension Of Disbelief: And you're going to need it for both movies.
- Wouldn't Shoot a Girl: Chev has little problem beating the shit out of and possibly killing cops, but merely threatens the lone female cop to make her keep her distance while he's recharging/escaping. The only time he actually does injury to a female is completely by accident, when he sets the Asian hooker on fire by hugging her while hallucinating... um, and on fire.
- Yellow Face: David Carradine as Poon Dong.
- You Fail Pharmacology Forever: Especially in the 2nd, averted in the first film.
- Your Princess Is In Another Castle: "This is not my fucking pumper!"
