Safe Review

Director: Boaz Yakin

Cast: Jason Statham, Chris Sarandon, Catherine Chan

Running time: 94 minutes

Certificate: 15

Synopsis: An ex-cage fighter (Statham) finds himself battling the mob, Triads and crooked cops when he becomes protector of a young girl (Chan) whose memory stores invaluable numerical codes…

There’s not much you need to know about SAFE. It’s Jason Statham, it’s an action-thriller, and there’s a lot of shooting. Oh, and there’s a plot in there somewhere too, but you’d hardly notice amongst, well, all that shooting.

And if you did try to decipher SAFE’s 94 minute runtime, needless to say you’d have a hard time doing it. The film opens about three quarters of the way through, with scenes of a young girl running through a subway station and being interrogated by gangsters, then backtracks a couple of times until we get to the start, where said girl is correcting her teacher’s math in school. Lost yet?

The crux of SAFE is not the eponymous titular MacGuffin, but instead a young girl with the ability to memorise numbers in an instant. Lots and lots of numbers. So who better than this human computer to eliminate any paper (or electronic, if you will) trail back to the Chinese Triads who ‘recruited’ her in the first place? SAFE runs with this idea for far longer than needed, but eventually we get to the real use of the girl: to memorise a page of numbers that hide a code for, you guessed it, a safe. The safe in question contains $30 million, and it turns out it’s not only the Chinese who want it.

So here’s where things get interesting. Three warring factions of New York – the Triads, Russian Mafia and high-ranking corrupt cops – suddenly come to blows, and of course the Furious Potato gets caught in the middle of it all. Statham himself has a hardly unique setup: having refused to comply with a fixed boxing match, he’s managed to piss off some pretty powerful people. Soon he’s out on the streets; always looking over his shoulder, always under constant threat. But just as he’s about to end it all on a subway, we find ourselves back at the start again – though it’s actually halfway through – with the girl running down the underground platform. Statham notices something’s up, and after a punchy train ride, teams up with the youngster – giving his life new purpose. Isn’t that sweet?

But crooked sentiments aside, we’ve finally arrived at the meat of the plot – and things get turned, if not quite up to 11, then at least to a healthy 8 or 9. The action rarely calms from here, with shootout following shootout following shootout. There’s very little to set SAFE apart from the rest of, well, even just Jason Statham’s films, who’s arguably established his own genre with this type of action flick – think CRANK and THE MECHANIC – but it’s a genre he’s well deserving of. An actor at the top of his game, he’s certainly mastered the ‘shoot this, act hard as bastard nails’ routine by this point.

Of course, the one thing that does set SAFE apart is its attempt to inject a little heart into the proceedings – in the form of Statham’s relationship with the girl he seems ready to go to any lengths to save. Writer/director Boaz Yakin seems to have good intentions with this plot thread, but sadly it’s somewhat disparaged by Statham’s focus on shooting the hell out of everyone in sight – he’s something of a lone wolf, shall we say – to get his hands on the $30 million everyone’s so desperate to grab hold of. The final scene attempts to get things back on track, but by this point we’re left wondering who the bad guy really is: after all, Statham seems to have killed more people than anyone else on screen.

But questionable scripting aside, SAFE at least offers us at least a good hour of entertainment amongst the muddled, back-and-forth plot. Yakin tries to take things in a different direction, but ultimately his efforts prove futile, and we’re left with another bland shoot-em-up. Not Statham’s best work, but if you’re a fan of his particular brand of gunslinging mayhem, you’ll enjoy this.

My biggest disappointment? With a $30 million budget (how appropriate), there isn’t one explosion. Not a single kaboom, kablamo or whambam. But never mind. At least there’s a car crash…

 SAFE is released in UK cinemas 4th May.