Vintage

If you didn’t get enough of Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) in Crank then Crank: High Voltage is for you.  This movie picks up right where the first left off – literally.  The film’s opening scene shows Chev falling from a helicopter, which was the final scene of the original film.
 
In this installment it is a race against time for Chev to find his heart.  You see, a group of Chinese mobsters pick Chev up after he crashes from that fall.  While in their custody they cut Chev open and steal his heart and replace it with a motorized one that isn’t designed to last.

Before the doctors can remove anymore of Chev’s organs he gets out of the makeshift hospital (after kicking some ass) and starts his search for his heart.  He enlists the help of his friend, Doc Miles (Dwight Yoakam), who explains to Chev that he has been fitted with an artificial heart. Once the external battery pack runs out, the internal battery will kick in and he will have one hour before it stops working.  

Now it is a mad race against time to find the heart.  One disastrous thing happens after the other.  The battery pack gets smashed up, the car Chev is driving gets wreaked, he gets into a few fights.  In the midst of all of this he has to keep electrocuting himself to stay alive. 

Gran Torino is the story of a haggard, gritty, and retired Polish American Korean war veteran by the name of Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood).  Kowalski is a hardnosed, autoworker who apparently killed people in Korea.  Years later he lived out his life—married, had a couple kids—worked at a Detroit Ford factory and is now content to watch his world change over into a rundown neighborhood, overrun, if you will, by Hmong immigrants, teen gangs and what not.  In his garage, he keeps a vintage 1972 Gran Torino.  Memories of war bombs explode in the locked trunk of his mind, which he guards privately and as fiercely as his prized car.

All vestiges of his old glory life are gone if Walt ever did have a glory life.  It would be more accurate to say Walt had a way of life, which he came to grips with and, one might say, had a life that came to grips with him.  He wasn’t going to change just because of the times and even if his times saw that his wife died before he did, Walt would remain unchangeable.  

A priest tries to get him to confess what appears to be a submerged iceberg of guilt.
His wife of the ages recently passed as the film opens and Kowalski can only grimace and literally snarl a bit, which he does a lot of during the film.  We are lead to believe, Walt is unkind at the beginning of the film, but that is not true. His character is revealed by adversity, tempered by history that called for him to be hard and tough or die.

Try as he might, Walk simply can’t ignore the new reality of his world.   The world is moving in on him. Whereas he fought against Asian, it would be appear a tough pill to swallow as Asian immigrants slowly replace White working class Americans in his Michigan neighborhood.
A Hmong neighbor, a teen, Thao Vang Lor (Bee Vang) is pushed into trying to steal Walt’s Gran Torino as part of an initiation into a street gang, which Vang Lor attempts to resist but can’t.  He gets caught by Walt stealing his car and is almost shot.