'Safe' Lives Up to Its Title.

We're looking for a Chinese girl, 11 years old. She's short and she speaks Mandarin and English--POLICE OFFICER.

Luckily, there's more to 'Safe' than having a messy dialogue. Its violence is of a degree between subtlety and extreme--just the right amount. It feats delightful and inventive stunt-work which concludes as the best ace the film that have played. While violently inventive, you fare scene by scene and you'll look for anything else. You'd fail. There's nothing new and remarkable left. It is hurtful to say that 'Safe' lives up to its title - it is adhering to the conventional Statham formula: a good man looking stern while shoving pain to bad guys' faces.

To surpass the latter Statham films ('The Killer Elite' and 'Blitz') 'Safe' is already a better film. But in the end, it lives up to its title: "safe". Literally.

 

Luke Wright (Statham, 'The Bank Job') is a cage fighter living his life within the martial-arts circuit. His life is numbing and problematic - he beats opponents and afterwards visits them in their wards. He clearly doesn't like his job. By a Russian mafia he is afoul, leaving him alone in his now more problematic life. His wife was killed by the Russian mob and he can't do nothing about it, thus, he resumes his life walking in the streets of the Big Apple wandering away from people that might get attached to him. He can't get attached to anyone - or else the Russians will kill them instantly.

In grief and despair; inside the subway, he finds a young Asian girl named Mei (newcomer Charlene Chan) who is troubled herself as he is. She has the code. Mei is a genius and she had remembered a code to a safe. It all turns out that Russians and Chinese are off to the safe which envelopes something critically important to both sides. They are all mafias, and set in the middle is Luke and he is the key. All he have been wanting to do is to help the young girl who unintentionally given his life new purpose. What purpose? Beat mafia boss' asses? I think it is. 

 

Remember the film 'The Transporter'? There's an Asian girl too. Only she'd be the love interest. Besides the prior mention of the Stathamian convention, Statham films also tend to somehow adhere to the fundamentals of narratives like this one. Troubled as he set himself inside the middle of chaos, that works for Statham and it worked for him before over and over.

In the process of climaxing, complex elements are intently tangled for an ambitious goal. Filmmaker Boaz Yakin who is known for loving violence clearly visible in his produced film, 'Hostel', handles these elements efficiently and in fact I have thought of him inventive with fight sequences shot inside side-view mirrors of cars. 

We have been deceived by Stathamian films before. It impresses you with a promise in the beginning and leaves you in the middle of nowhere in the end. Weirdly though, this had a distinct sting that made it superior to Statham's better formulaic films.