Cranking up the action

MANILA, Philippines - Three years ago, in the action movie Crank, Jason Statham played Chev Chelios, a hitman who literally had to fight to stay alive. He spent 24 hours fighting and killing to keep his adrenaline flowing — all to prevent a deadly poison from spreading through his veins.

Now he’s back in Crank: High Voltage, which picks up right where the first movie left off. The movie opens showing Chev surviving a supposedly lethal fall only to be kidnapped by a Chinese mobster. Three months later, he wakes up without his nearly indestructible heart, which he learns has been surgically removed and replaced with a battery-operated one.

After he escapes from his captors, Chev finds himself pursued by a Mexican gangster named El Huron (played by Clifton Collins Jr.) and the Chinese Triad, led by the deadly 100-year-old elder Poon Dong (David Carradine). Like he did in the first movie, Chev turns to his friends Doc Miles (Dwight Yoakam), Venus (Efren Ramirez) and his girlfriend Eve (Amy Smart) for help. Chev is determined to get his real heart back and get revenge on whoever stole it — no matter what it takes.

That makes for some particularly electrifying action sequences in Crank: High Voltage, including a high-octane car chase along the streets of Los Angeles. The bulk of the movie was shot using HD (high definition cameras).

“I was in right from the suggestion of doing a part two,” Statham recalls. “The first film was open-ended. If you look closely, you’ll see that there was a heartbeat and the blink of an eye. So it was really about whether Mark and Brian (the screenwriters who did the first movie) had the inspiration to go and make another one. It was always left open in their eyes.”

Crank: High Voltage opens April 17 in theaters.