Saturday, April 25, 2009

The Passion of the Chelios?


For those who have not seen either Crank or Crank: High Voltage, these films tell the story of Chev Chelios, a hitman who, for various reasons, must take rather extreme actions to stay alive.

While these films could be written off as bread and circuses for an increasingly desensitized mass audience, they seem to contain hidden depths. Without spoiling the ending for Crank: High Voltage, in the end of the film our hero finds himself in a situation which mirrors the passion of Christ. After being whipped by his prosecutor Chelios ascends a wooden power-line and cruxifies himself between the wires. Chelios, however, does not die. He comes back down to earth bathed in light (albeit light provided from his own burning flesh) and returns to one of his allies, a female prostitute.

Now, I don't mean to imply that the writer of Crank: High Voltage is in any way attempting to convey a spiritual (or even intellectual) message to his audience. The realization that Chelios is a parallel for Christ made the ending to this movie even more amusing. And if you're going to make a sequal to a movie in which the main character falls from an airplane onto cement and lives, how else are you going to top youself?

This does raise an extremely important question, however, how is Crank 3 ever going to top this?

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