Nothing this sexy ever happens when my car battery dies. F@ck my life...

Anyway, this completely hot still is from Statham’s newest Crank flick, High Voltage. Give this man an Oscar already.

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He's one of the last remaining legitimate action stars and this weekend sees Jason Statham return to the electrifying franchise "Crank". Picking up from where the first film left off, "Crank High Voltage" finds hitman Chev Chelios (Statham) still alive after falling from a helicopter and dying - except he didn't because of his indestructible heart. Now that very heart has been replaced with an electric model to keep him going while they harvest his other organs for transplant. Chelios has to go on the hunt for the missing pump, while keeping himself going with regular electric shocks. Here, Statham talks to Movies.ie about his return to the Crank franchise, getting in shape for the pic and his work on Sly Stallone's Expandable:

Q: What can you say about Crank 2? How crazy was it to make?

JS: "It was one of the most enjoyable films I've shot in the last decade. It is absolutely madder than you could imagine. It's so offensive! Whatever the first one was, this one's more - just completely rude, offensive and plain mad in every way. It's great, there's no movie like it and they've exceeded all expectations. Chev Chelios is running around with a plastic heart. They're farming him for his organs, because he's the man that cannot die, so they give him an 'Aviacore,' a totally artificial heart, and he's trying to find his heart. I'm giving too much away now."

Q: Can you give an example of how crazy it is?

JS: "No. It is nuts. It's like the first one, times 100. It's just ridiculous."

Q: Were you kind of surprised that they were going to make another one, considering how your character was left at the end of the first film? You fell out of a helicopter in the first film, so the audience assumed that you were dead...

"Crank'' star Jason Statham opens up about his new big-screen thriller -- and what it's like to film a sex scene in front of 250 people and a couple stray dogs.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So Crank is basically like Speed — only the bus is a dude!
JASON STATHAM: It's a great idea, isn't it? I play this guy who's a hit man. And he gets poisoned and it kind of binds with his blood. And the only way to sustain his life is to pump up his heart rate, which raises his adrenaline.

And that would create challenges for you as an actor, because you're literally running around?
Yeah, [my character] Chev Chelios gets very creative on how he can sustain that pulsating heart. It's sort of the comedy value of the movie. It's a desperate man doing desperate things. I don't know how you describe it. We never set out to make a funny film, and still some people are laughing constantly at some of the stuff within it. It's a guy who's running around L.A., trying to get the guy who killed him. And he has a certain amount of time to do so, and if he stops he dies. You could imagine how crazy that was. It was 30 days of filming. We were getting pretty tired sometimes.

How do you train for something like this?
Well, you can't really. If you can run a little bit, you just kind of get in there and go for it.

Has anyone done more to redefine the action hero than Jason Statham?

Matt Damon upended the spy genre with his portrayal of Jason Bourne, and Daniel Craig breathed new life into the creaking James Bond series, but neither has yet managed to turn his action-hero persona into a franchise. That may represent conscious choices on their parts to avoid typecasting — but typecasting seems to be working fairly well for Mr. Statham.

The 36-year-old actor, who stars in this week's maniac gangster sequel, "Crank: High Voltage," has made more than a dozen movies since his breakout role in Guy Ritchie's hyperstylized 1998 crime comedy, "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels." Many of those feature him in his signature guise as a slick, smooth criminal operative — a gangland assassin in the Crank films, a suit-and-tie driver in the "Transporter" films, a tough-talking bank robber in "The Bank Job."

Mr. Statham's movies haven't been Bourne- or Bond-sized megahits — he's a B-movie star. But most of his films, particularly the "Transporter" series, have earned their studios tidy sums. The string of successes has made Mr. Statham the reigning king of the midsized, niche-audience action film.

With his unique blend of attributes — the rakish European suave of Sean Connery, the cocky confidence of a rap star, the martial-arts skills of Jet Li, the receding hairline of Bruce Willis — he's following in the footsteps of action heroes past. But he's also remaking the idea of the action icon for the Xbox age into something influenced as much by video games, hip-hop and martial arts as by James Bond or John Wayne.

In a way, Mr. Statham has resurrected a version of the blue-collar action stars who dominated the 1980s and early 1990s. During that time, big, brawny bruisers like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone made dozens of movies in roughly the same mold: shoot-'em-ups and beat-'em-ups about beefy, inarticulate lugs with arms the size of felled oaks who bulldozed baddies by the dozen.

The core audience for all those films was the same: working-class men who wanted to see tough guys doing tough jobs — heroes, in other words, who resembled exaggerated versions of how they saw themselves.