Review: Safe (2012)
Cast: Jason Statham, Catherine Chan, Chris Sarandon
Director: Boaz Yakin
Country: USA
Genre: Action | Crime | Thriller
Official Trailer: Here
Your enjoyment of Safe is really going to depend entirely on your expectations for it. If you’re expecting anything with an ounce of meaningful storytelling, run away fast. Safe is a film that draws upon nearly every single action cliché in the book and then some, utilizing them in the most cheesy and non-ironic way. This creates for some situations of big, dumb fun, but for most of the runtime, it’s a really tedious and dull affair. However, if you’re a Jason Statham fan who just wants to watch him throat-punching and killing an insane amount of bad guys, Safe might be right up your alley.
This creates for some situations of big, dumb fun, but for most of the runtime, it’s a really tedious and dull affair.
The film opens with crosscutting between two stories. On one side, we have a young Chinese girl who just happens to be a mathematical genius. The local Chinese mafia takes notice of her talents and “adopts” her so they can use her to decode a combination for two different safes; one with $30 million in it, the other with an unknown prize. Simultaneously, we’re introduced to Luke, a second-rate cage fighter who angers the local Russian mafia by putting an opponent in a coma on accident instead of going down in the second round like he was supposed to. Apparently Bruce Willis’ character from Pulp Fiction wasn’t available for the role.
The Russians kill Luke’s wife and unborn child, then force him to live on the streets, with the promise that anyone he tries to associate with outside of everyday business will die until he kills himself. He lives with this until finally considering ending it all when he spots the little girl running through the Subway station alone, having escaped her captors. After saving her from them on the train, he puts it upon himself to protect her, feeling he owes her for saving his life. From here on out, the film amasses a staggeringly high body count amid a convoluted tale of double crosses and corruption.
Like I said, stop me if you’ve heard this one before. At times, Safe is a lot of fun, but these are few and far between. It’d be incorrect of me to assert that the film is bloated; it clocks in at a mercifully short 95 minutes, but it still drags quite a bit when there isn’t a shootout or fistfight happening. Reggie Lee practically steals the show, but only because he plays up the ridiculous things his character says with a completely straight face. During one scene towards the middle of the film, he makes an entirely illogical move to take hostages from a restaurant, with no real end game in mind for it, and then kills one of them after threatening to do so, but in a completely unintentionally hilarious manner. It was moments like this that I found myself howling with laughter because I was having fun, despite how monumentally stupid the film was becoming.
It’s monumentally dumb and painfully dull most of the time, but it has its moments.
And really, that’s the rub of a film like this. It’s monumentally dumb and painfully dull most of the time, but it has its moments. But as it progresses, it gets further and further away from those moments of absurd fun and takes itself way too seriously. I found my mind wandering quite a bit in the third act because I just simply didn’t care about what was going on, I just wanted it to hurry up and finish before I lost interest for good and decided to take a nap instead. If you’re looking for something completely brainless and silly, you’ll probably enjoy Safe. But ultimately, it amounts to little more than an HBO movie on a Saturday afternoon, or maybe a film worth having a drinking game over. Otherwise, it isn’t worth a trip to the theatre to be mostly bored with moments of fun.
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