CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGEA glue-huffing variant on the gimmick-noir D.O.A., 2006’s Crank was a riotous demonstration of the Actionvore’s Dilemma: The harsher the swill you consume — “swill” in this case meaning an all-you-can-eat strip-bar lunch buffet of mindless splatter, bone-jarring crashes, and beyond-gratuitous T&A — the harder it is to get high. The second time around, squinting at a bar they set themselves for skull-busting dementia, writer-directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor aim for nothing less than permanent synaptic damage. The heart that served Jason Statham’s indestructible Chev Chelios so well in the original is literally yanked from his chest and plugged into a priapic Triad ganglord — David Carradine as “Poon Dong.” (The buckteeth are a classy touch.) That leaves Chev to jump-start his Cost-Cutter synthetic heart with bigger, gnarlier jolts of electricity as he chases down his ticker: jumper cables to the tongue, Taser to the nut sack, high-voltage towers, etc. The diminishing returns of shock value are the movie’s built-in joke, and it would be a lot funnier without the directors’ unforgivably bratty postsexist/postracist/posthuman showboating: It’s a 25-way tie as to which of the women characters (including Amy Smart’s inexplicably loyal girlfriend) is written, treated and photographed with the most contempt. At its most delirious, though, this is the Gremlins 2 of action cinema, ready to split its own seams at any moment with chat-show parodies, meta-manic video-game interludes and Tex Avery–style bloodshed. Call it the most expensive Troma movie ever made, with the Lloyd Kaufman cameo to prove it. (Citywide) (Jim Ridley)
GO EARTH A big-screen, family-friendly (well . . . friendlier) version of the enthralling BBC/Discovery series Planet Earth, Earth follows three animal families — polar bears scavenging for food in the High Arctic; elephants trekking across the Kalahari Desert in search of water; a humpback whale and her young calf on their annual 4,000-mile migration — as they struggle to survive the unrelenting harshness of their disparate climates, a task made all the more difficult by a dangerously warming planet (a point repeated subtly throughout the film). State-of-the-art camera equipment captures images of startling clarity and proximity. There isn’t one frame of CGI. (Much of the material appeared in the television series, but 30 percent of the footage is new.) Death always occurs off-camera, but tension levels remain high: A leopard catches a young gazelle, but the camera turns away before the actual kill; the plight of a polar bear is left to the imagination (but proves heartbreaking nonetheless). Lighter moments also abound. Venturing outside their tre house for the first time, Mandarin ducklings test their tiny wings, only to drop straight down onto the ground. Their fall cushioned by a bed of leaves, they pop up and waddle off, none the worse for wear. (Citywide) (Jean Oppenheimer)
FIGHTING Like the Fast and the Furious franchise, Fighting purports to offer us an insider’s view of an illicit underground subculture that comes alive just as the city’s ordinary, decent denizens go to bed. Here, it’s the world of bare-knuckles brawling, whose competitors fight not out of emasculated rage against an overly commodified society like the angry young men of Fight Club but simply because they enjoy it, or because there’s money to be made. The last is the impetus for Shawn MacArthur (Channing Tatum), a romanticized vision of the cornpone rube trying to make it in the big city, whose pugilistic skills catch the eye of a sweet-talking ticket–scalper-cum–fight-promoter (Terrence Howard). Fighting director Dito Montiel, who won the Sundance directing prize for his erratic but absorbing 2006 debut feature A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, seems incapable of making an ordinary bad movie — he’s too much of a willful eccentric, with a casual disregard for things like backstory, character development and narrative tension, and a high indulgence for eccentric performers like Howard (here playing an unholy cross between Ratso Rizzo and Mr. Miyagi) and Tatum (who may be the most sullen and inexpressive leading man this side of Josh Hartnett). So Fighting plays like an exploitation movie that thinks it’s an art movie, with lackluster fight scenes, a grafted-on romance, and no art anywhere to be found. (Citywide) (Scott Foundas)
GO THE GARDEN The power of Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s 2002 documentary OT: Our Town was in how Kennedy unobtrusively captured the racial tensions at Compton’s Dominguez High School, and in the ways students and faculty used art to celebrate difference, to transcend animosities. In his Oscar-nominated sophomore doc The Garden, power plays unfold along lines of backroom politics, race and poverty; nothing like the elixir of art saves the day. The film follows the years-long struggle over 14 acres of land between Latino farmers, on one hand, and L.A. city government and a powerful businessman on the other. From that David and Goliath setup, filmed in a straightforward style on a shoestring budget, emerge fascinating character studies that underscore both the best and worst of human nature. The farmers coalesce into a formidable political entity; community activists are revealed to be shady power brokers; the embattled turn on one another. What makes the film worth seeing is how Kennedy’s camera captures a complex assortment of real-life personalities and hidden motivations, which are made all the more staggering for being slowly unpeeled (although the film never drags). The Garden makes it clear that, regardless of the battle’s outcome, there is victory in the fact that the farmers fought at all. (Nuart) (Ernest Hardy)
