A while back I was watching TV when an ad came on for Crank 2 (AKA Crank high voltage) I wondered how in the hell they were going to pull that one off given how Crank ended. So today I saw the bluray on offer and I thought why not lets strap in for some adrenaline fuelled madness.

The first Crank I have to say I quite liked. It was crazy and over the top but unpretentious. It was unashamedly a mad action film it had a pretence of story but didn't let it get in the way of things. They start of with some stupid reason for why Jason Statham had to act like a complete nutter and then just ran with it.

This second outing had an even more insane premise than the first one (which for the record was that Chev Chelios/Jason Statham was injected with a poison that would kill him if he didn't keep his body pumped full of adrenaline) this time round Chinese triads have grabbed Chev's body from where he landed at the end of the first film and stolen his heart and replaced it with an artificial one.

Now at this point it's probably wise to forget everything you ever knew about electronics, magnetic induction, biology, and probably physics just for good measure as the film then has him power up his artificial heart in a variety of implausible ways. Taking Taser shots, an electric shock dog collar, high voltage wires, a car ignition system, jump leads, and most bizarrely friction.

The film is pretty straight forward Chev wants his heart back and crashes from gun fight to gun fight chasing people to get it. Various people reappear from the first film including a few who died. Jason Statham is Chev Chelios he basically plays the same character he's done in a lot of films as shaven headed nut job cockney geezer. Amy Smart reprising her role as Chev's girlfriend and spends most of the time in her underwear.

The film has some stock shots it likes to use over and over again, Statham growling at the camera while it jump cuts round him. Swooping shots around either Statham running or around or under nearly naked women. It can get a little disorienting at times as the camera is in almost constant motion. One of the shots in the extras shows the camera man on roller blades and this explains a lot.

There are quite a lot of cameos in this film though they are pretty odd Chester Bennington from Linkin Park (he was apparantly in Crank as well I'm not sure that I spotted him then), various porn stars including Ron Jeremy, Geri Halliwell, John de Lancie, and even the late David Carradine.

It seems this film has been set up to outdo Crank in every way possible and sometimes it is pretty good but in a lot of ways it takes the joke just a little too far it's so implausible and the scenes often don't hang together very well. The overall flow of Crank was smoother it didn't feel forced as this one sometimes does. Still it is completely mad action film and it definitely goes above and beyond everything Crank did in nearly every way. If you liked Crank there is a good chance you'll find this to your liking though even then it might be a bit much for some people.

So we're back from holidays, it was a good trip the last few days we had no internet (well the hotel had it that was a prerequisite for all our hotels it was just extortionate to have in the room) and we were relaxing so we didn't do any posts.

I've done a quick highlights post I believe byrn plans to do likewise.

Anyway the adventure is over we'll probably add a few of the panorama's we took that netbooks are not really up to processing and also the timelapse which was also a bit much for the low power processors to deal with since it needs a bit of fiddling.

All in all a top trip and now jetlag will need recovering from as it's back to work tomorrow.

Greetings, you may ... or may not have noticed this site has been up and down a lot over the last few days. This is due to our patented last minute pre-thing upgrade where with days to spare we completely rewrite large sections of the site to accommodate some new function only a very short time till we need it.

Last time was for the world trip, this time is for the first of our revisit holidays. Both Byrn and myself felt we didn't really have enough time to appreciate every where we visited on our wonderful world trip last time round so we thought why not go back and revisit the places for a bit longer doing one revisit a year. Since that's essentially a 5 year plan and people that know us will see how out of character planning that far ahead is for us whether we succeed in this endevour is to be seen.

However the first step is almost starting, on august 15th we will be winging our way to sunny california for a three week revisit of San Francisco. This time we will be taking in some more of the country side around the area taking a tour around part of the state to places like Lake Tahoe and Yosimite.

We plan to do a similar thing as with the world trip and have some logs of our activities with photos galore. As such we have overhauled the World Trip section of the website to now allow for multiple trips you will notice on the top bar the world trip is now changed to trips and if you click that you will get a list of our trips and dates selecting one will take you to the old trip screen.

Naturally the RSS will still spit out updates as an when we do them but for those who want to get straight to the action the new trips home page you can reach that here. At the moment it just contains our empty itinerary but over the coming days it will fill up with stuff as we enjoy our time at large in California.

I've seen a fair number of films recently. This is mainly due to having to go the US on business which always involves 12 hours sat in a too small seat with little or no leg room with nothing much to do.

This usually means the quality of the entertainment I select is somewhat variable. It seemed this time that it was especially bad with nothing obvious that I wanted to see here's the highlights or lowlights.

Saw this rather odd film called Bronson about britain's most violent prisoner. It didn't help the flow of the film that the entertainment system kept freezing but still this is a pretty strange bit of cinema. Tom Hardy playing the main character does a very good job at playing a nutter. I think the last time I saw him was playing Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist and the only other role I know of his is the bad guy from Star Trek Nemesis so I guess he has Nutters down.

I watched Pixar's Bolt a bit kidsy but Pixar stuff is almost always watchable at some level. The whole dog that believes he's a super hero when in fact he's just a normal dog on a tv show is an interesting premise if a bit crazy. The animation was wonderful as always and it wasn't a bad voice cast.

It even got so bad that I decided to watch Twilight just to see what the fuss was about. Blimey what a train wreak that film is I can only assume the books are like that because the film meanders all over the place making very little sense, I guess you have to worship the books to get it. Seemed like a half arsed vampire film to me with a load of pale 30 year olds pretending to be teenagers. I've seen better many times before, for me Near Dark will always be the best Vampire film.

I also watched The Bourne Supremacy which I think is my favourite of the three films. One is good two is terribly depressing but three is pretty good and does nicely round up the series. It's lots of really well executed action and spy intrigue which went down well after the mush that I'd had to wade through in the previous film.

Recently I also watched Star Trek which I really enjoyed. I'd had my doubts about this when it was coming up and after the last few trek films that were just awful who can blame me but it seemed pretty much perfect in it's execution. Even in some really good films there are often weak points you can highlight that don't ruin the film but seem to be areas they could have done better. In this film I couldn't really think of any. The only niggling comments I could put against it are really just nitpicking. There is a certain amount of deus ex machina to make the plot work but it is internally consistent and they take a few liberties with physics but still it is a real joy of a film to watch with an excellent cast wonderful special effects great action and a great story. Basically go out and see it now.

I forgot to mention that Byrn and myself had been to see Watchmen a week or so back. I'd had very mixed feelings about this film as I love the graphic novel and was worried Hollywood would screw it up. The initial trailer gave me some hope as it seemed to match the feel of the book.

Having now seen the finished article I'm still of two minds. I was never expecting it to be a 1 to 1 conversion because it just isn't possible to do that bits were going to have to change to fit into the new medium but still some of the changes they have made I feel they shouldn't have or should have tried something else. I did quite like it as a film especially the visual style it matches the book very well and a lot of the scenes are completely faithful to Dave Gibbons art. Most of the performances are pretty good, I think the standout for me was the guy playing Rorschach.

Where it get's hazy is some of the plot changes which mean a lot of it doesn't make sense, the compression of the story, and the loss of subtlety. The book tended to be fairly subtle implying things but not openly stating them, the movie rams the points down your throat.

It's still a pretty good movie though a little disjointed. I'm not sure if my greater knowledge of the overall plot meant I got more out of the film since I already know how the story goes, perhaps Byrn can shed more light on that since he hasn't read the book so may have a completely different perspective on the film in his review.

If you haven't read the book you really should it's one of the best graphic novels ever made.