Chev Chelios, a no-nonsense hitman for the Mafia in Los Angeles, begins by falling out of a helicopter. He somehow survives the fall, but things will get worse before they get better, as some sketchy-looking Chinese doctors pull him off the street and into the back of a van. They remove his heart from his chest, replace it with an artificial electric-powered one, and keep him held prisoner. When he overhears the doctors saying they're going to harvest all of his body parts, including his genitalia, he leaps back to life, killing everyone around him... but he is restricted in his movement, as his electric heart must remain attached to a battery. He makes his way toward the club where he can find the mobster he knows was responsible for this, and on the way, he calls his friend, the sleazy Doc Miles, to ask about his condition. He's told when the battery runs out, his heart will only have sixty minutes of life left before it shuts down. Unfortunately, on his way to the club, Chelios gets in a car crash and his battery is smashed to pieces. He starts running toward the club, but when his heart starts to slow down, he has a passerby use jumper cables to electrocute him, re-charging his battery for another hour. He loses sight of the mobster in a gunfight at the club, but he does find his girlfriend Eve, who became a stripper while he was being held captive. When he learns that the man responsible for taking his heart is El Huron, the brother of some Mafia men that he killed earlier in his life, he must set out to find El Huron and get his heart back, all while electrocuting himself madly every hour to stay alive.
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Best part of story, including ending:
This is not just an awesome action movie, tremendously violent and exciting, but it's also a terrific satire of the phony nature of Los Angeles-- it's smarter than one may think.
Best scene in story:
In the final shootout, Chelios is about to die so he grabs some electric cables which ignite him on fire, and while burning alive, he continues fighting.
Opinion about the main character:
Chelios is not a good guy, but he does have a lot of the macho characteristics we desire to see in an action movie hero, and Statham is, per usual, a pretty awesome star in these roles.
