Once the hazy smoke of gunfire clears and all empty cartridges crash upon the floor, "Safe" ultimately remains a ship without a captain. That is to say, the film basically serves no purpose other than to dazzle...but the razzle-dazzle aspect is certainly impressive.
Written and directed by Boaz Yakin of "Remember the Titans" fame, the film pairs up new-era action stud Jason Statham with first-timer Catherine Chan. Statham plays Luke Wright, a down on his luck ex-cop/assassin turned B-level MMA fighter who finds himself in a heap of trouble when he fails to fall in the second round of a fight. In doing so, he returns home to find his wife slain in cold blood at the hands of the Russian mob. Acting newcomer Chan plays 12-year-old Mei, a certified math genius with the ability to memorize long strings of numbers with her photographic memory. She is kidnapped from her home in China and brought to New York to work for the Chinese Triad gang.
Along the way, these two unlikely friends are united under peculiar circumstances. Mei has memorized a very important code that is later revealed to be the combination to a safe, which both the Triads and Russians want to claim for their own. Meanwhile, Wright takes the girl under his wing in an attempt to protect the girl from harm and enact revenge against the Russians for his fallen wife. Throw into the mix a bevy of crooked NYC cops who take payouts from both crime syndicates, and you have most of your action film cliches just about covered.
Edited much like any modern action movie, with cuts so quick you'll almost have a seizure, "Safe" is a dizzying gala of fisticuffs. It's a ham-fisted affair with a plot rushed along to the point where nearly every character is expendable, without care from a viewer's perspective. The fight scenes are brutal and brilliantly choreographed, but the trailer unfortunately gives away the single best sequence in the film, so proceed accordingly. There are still a slew of non-spoilered fight scenes that will keep you satiated throughout and enough bullet holes riddled into bodies to fill a cemetery.
"Safe" starts off well enough, introducing each character through a series of rewind montages. However, it doesn't take long for the film to throw all caution to the wind by reducing itself to the lowest common denominator of violence. The movie suffers from a serious lack of character development; even the main characters are merely hollow shells in a movie where seemingly everybody dies. It's hard to build up the energy to care when the motivations simply aren't there. The movie is not so much divided into good and evil as evil and not-as-evil.
Frankly everyone is a scumbag in this, even Statham's character. The character of Mei is the only glimmer of good in the movie, and unfortunately her character is haphazardly underutilized. She is basically the pawn around whom the action is centered and may as well just be a walking piece of paper with a safe combination written on it, given how underdeveloped her character is in the movie.
Character development (or lack thereof) notwithstanding, the movie manages to churn along at a furious pace with more and more bloodshed from scene to scene. Then the movie just ends. It simply reaches an incredibly forced, predictable resolution before the credits just roll. No last hurrah. No final battle. No fulfillment. Just a terrible final wrap-up laced with cliched last words and eye-rolling tag lines used throughout the movie — a fitting end to a spectacularly lackluster movie.
The entire film is just that garishly contrived, but I found myself turning off my brain long enough to enjoy some fight scenes here and there. If you're looking for a cerebral action movie or, more simply, "Die Hard" for a new age, this is not anywhere near that kind of movie. Think more like Sylvester Stallone's "Get Carter" or Mel Gibson's "Payback," a second-rate action movie with all blood splatter and no heart. "Safe" ultimately gets the last laugh, delivering a movie so vapid and void of any substance that you'll wonder where the last two hours of your day went.