BE THE MAN: ‘The Rock’, Jason Statham and Van Damme. Who had the most impressive “action” scene?
1. Jason Statham
Most impressive scenes of Jason Statham when he performed the ʂҽx scene with his female co-star in front of a large audience
They don’t really make movies like Crank (2006) and Crank: High Voltage, its 2009 sequel, these days. Lewd, crude, and so implausibly over the top that it’s hard to tell whether their impossible action ideas came from science fiction, Saturday morning cartoons, or something far worse, they’re a gonzo pair of movies (both streaming now at Peacock) that purposely ditch immersive stories for immersive, firsthand thrills — and boy, on that count, they definitely deliver.
Both films star Jason Statham as Chev Chelios, a hitman targeted by his vendetta-minded L.A. underworld peers with deviously ridiculous revenge schemes that amount to ticking time-bomb death sentences. In Crank, Chev’s been dosed with an exotic injection that slows his heart and will kill him unless he keeps his adrenaline at the redline. In Crank: High Voltage, the stakes gleefully surge to even sillier heights: Chev’s heart gets replaced with an artificial device that periodically needs a jolt of pure electricity, if, that is, he wants it to keep ticking.
Neither Crank film did circuit-frying numbers at the box office, but each also garnered a hardcore audience of followers who deeply appreciated their devil-may-care disposition toward movie convention — even by R-rated standards — and good taste. Like the Farrelly brothers’ There’s Something About Mary back in 1998, the Crank movies delighted in giving the finger (both figuratively, and, at the end of High Voltage, even literally) to boundaries of every kind — including audiences’ willingness to suspend disbelief at Statham’s athletic, oh-no-he-didn’t pair of always-on performances.
Will They Ever Make a Third Crank Film?Just about everyone involved in making the Crank films (including Staham) has expressed interest at some point in shocking the franchise back to life with a third movie, but for the most part, chatter about a potential Crank 3 has quieted down in recent years. “We’ve been talking for years about Crank 3,” Statham hopefully told Entertainment Weekly back in 2015, explaining his admiration for writing-directing duo Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor.
“The first Crank, for me, was such a great experience,” Statham said. “It’s a wacky few weeks that you have with such talented directors. There’s no rules when you’re doing the Crank movies. We just keep going: ‘How are we going to get this off the ground?’ They have a loose idea [for Crank 3]. They haven’t written the script.”
Rather more recently, Taylor shed some light on how a changing entertainment culture makes a third Crank movie not exactly impossible, but definitely a more delicate proposition than in the past. “I don’t think you could make Crank in today’s climate,” he confided to Comicbook.com in 2018, citing the first two films’ “disrespectful, politically incorrect quality” as a tough Hollywood sell, with more than a decade separating his 2018 remarks from the original Crank.
“The one thing that I won’t do is sort of like a cheap, boring, tame version of the Crank movie,” he added. “There’s been opportunities to do that, and there’s definitely been opportunities to just, for purely financial reasons, make a version that I think Crank fans would find lame. I’m just not going to do it. There’s a lot of ideas for it. There’s a lot of great ideas for a Crank movie, but it’s got to be cool. Everybody’s head’s got to be in the right place. It has to be made for the right reasons. It’s got to be creatively driven.”
Since then, the juice has all but slowed to a trickle on fresh news that might spark fans’ Crank sequel wattage back to life. But in spite of Hollywood’s recently-heightened reluctance to embrace entertainment with no surge protection in place for shock value, Taylor still has managed to fry a few OMG moments right past the ol’ socket: He directed Christopher Meloni through two seasons of SYFY’s wacked-out adult comedy Happy! (2017-2019), while writing or co-writing the majority of the series’ seriously raunchy episodes.
Where to Stream the First 2 Crank MoviesIt’s tough to top a sequel that featured a guy with a draining battery for a heart, but if Crank: High Voltage ends up being the last Crank, we get it at least leaves the franchise humming at its highest possible frequency. Catch both Crank and Crank: High Voltage streaming now at Peacock, and save the date for May 19, when Statham is set to reprise his Fast Saga role as Deckard Shaw in Fast X (get tickets now!).
2. Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson
The Rock’s only extremely daring hot scene, when he has ʂҽx with an extremely hot female co-star, making viewers unable to sit still.
Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson packs on the PDA with lingerie-clad co-star Serinda Swan in racy sex scene for his sports drama Ballers
And Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson certainly had a treat in store for fans when he stripped off for a sex scene with gorgeous co-star Serinda Swan in the sports comedy drama.
The 44-year-old star, who plays former football superstar Spencer Strasmore, can be seen reclining on a bed as Serina, who plays Chloe, enters the room.
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The pair are seen locking lips in a passionate embrace, The Rock’s extensive body art is on full display.
Ballers has proved a ratings hit for HBO, with its first season becoming the network’s most-watched half-hour program in six years.
Steamy: Clad in just black French knickers, the stunning actress makes her way over to The Rock in a seductive fashion
Racy: The 44-year-old star, who plays former football superstar Spencer Strasmore, can be seen reclining on a bed as Serina, who plays Chloe, enters the room
Popular show: Ballers has proved a ratings hit for HBO, with its first season becoming the network’s most-watched half-hour program in six years
It averaged a weekly multi-platform audience of 8.8 million viewers, ranking behind Sex and the City (10.3 million) and the first season of Hung in 2009 (9.3 million).
Meanwhile, The Rock recently opened up about his motivations in transitioning from wrestling to acting.
He had no acting experience and no idea how Hollywood worked, so decided to forge his own path.
Success: It averaged a weekly multi-platform audience of 8.8 million viewers, ranking behind Sex and the City (10.3 million) and the first season of Hung in 2009 (9.3 million)
Career change: The Rock recently opened up about his motivations in transitioning from wrestling to acting
Making a success: He had no acting experience and no idea how Hollywood worked, so decided to forge his own path
The Rock previously said: ‘I couldn’t say, ‘Oh, let me just follow the half-black and half-Samoan actor who was also a wrestler. Let me follow his path.’ That wasn’t an option, that wasn’t there. So I was forced to create my own.’
He told AP: ‘I love being able to create big movies or TV shows that entertain people, that make them happy. I know what it’s like to earn a dollar.
‘I know what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck and wonder how you’re going to pay the rent. I know what it’s like to be evicted.
‘Money doesn’t fall out of the sky. So if you’re going to pay for your ticket, that inspires me to want to make a great movie.’
He told AP: ‘I love being able to create big movies or TV shows that entertain people, that make them happy. I know what it’s like to earn a dollar’
He continued: ‘Money doesn’t fall out of the sky. So if you’re going to pay for your ticket, that inspires me to want to make a great movie’
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2. Jean Claude Van Damme
Gianluca Palisi doubles (Jean Claude Van Damme) in a scene from the film Wake Of Death HD
It’s time for some action with martial arts legend Jean-Claude Van Damme (Bloodsport, Kickboxer) as he takes on a deadly gang of Triad gangsters with explosive results in the action-packed, hard-hitting Wake of Death which has had a blu-ray release courtesy of Kaleidoscope Entertainment.
Ex-mob enforcer Ben Archer (Van Damme) is ready to give up his life of crime and settle down to family life. But when his wife, Cynthia, attempts to help a Chinese refugee girl and brings her into their home, a new war is inadvertently triggered.
Discovering his wife brutally murdered and their son missing without a trace, Ben joins forces with his old underworld friends once again, embarking on a bloody vendetta to punish the Chinese Triad gang that is responsible.
Wake of Death was originally released back in 2004 and with Van-Damme in the lead role of the film you would expect it to be an all-out action movie, he may not be high-kicking and leg splitting as much as he did back in the movies like TimeCop, but for fans of the martial arts legend, this is a movie that they will want in their blu-ray collection.
The film is a bit of a slow start to it with it playing much more of a character building of Van Damme’s character with the love of his wife, son and his home life, but with the Chinese Triad moving into the storyline we know that something is going to go wrong and that Archer will be stepping it to the plate to kick some proverbial backside, eventually.
It’s almost 30 minutes before we get to the moment that triggers the revenge factor with a rather brutal and bloody attack on Archer’s family and his gun battle before finding his slaine family, I was hoping at this point that this is where the Wake of Death would start to kick in with some Van Damme ass whippings, you know the sort, the sort we had back in the early days with the likes of Hard Target.
Sadly, for me, I really found the film a little too slow for my liking, maybe I still like those earlier Van Damme movies, Wake of Death just seemed to drag along with lots of slow motion scenes and I did find the sexual scenes with the Triads a little too much. This is certainly not one of the best Van Damme movies, but then again it’s not the worst of them, if you are a fan of Van Damme then you’ll probably enjoy the film more than I did.
Wake of Death stars Jean-Claude Van Damme, Simon Yam (Ip Man) and Philip Tan (Showdown in Little Tokyo), it’s been released in a limited run of only 3,000 copies.
