'Safe' review: Accent on Statham's acting, action
Published 4:00 am, Friday, April 27, 2012
Face it, no one pays to hear Jason Statham deliver Shakespearean monologues - we pay to watch him kick multiple keisters simultaneously - but lordy, he acts up a storm in the compressed opening minutes of "Safe."
In the time it takes lesser action stars to crack their knuckles, Statham: apologizes to a grieving mother; spews righteous anger at a bookie; weeps over the death of his wife at the hands of Russian mobsters; shoulders the indignities of homelessness; and, toughest of all, doubles over with maniacal laughter when he's caught penniless at a bodega. The thing is, he does these things well - all but the New York accent he tries to adopt.
Fortunately, he doesn't have much occasion to use it. Outside of that opening sequence, dialogue does not play a starring role in "Safe," a bruising, beastly and wickedly economical action flick from writer-director Boaz Yakin ("Remember the Titans") that kills and kills and kills again. And when that's finished, kills some more.
Statham's character, an ex-cop (sort of) named Luke, does quite a lot of the liquidating, enough to classify him as a mass murderer, but no worries: he's that singularly cinematic creature known as the Deeply Moral Assassin. As such, he invites and holds audience affection for all 95 minutes that it takes him to right the universe and/or slay everyone in sight.
Aside from Luke, the other protagonist-slash-shining-moral-paragon is Mei (newcomer Catherine Chan), a young math genius snatched from the streets of Nanjing and brought to the States to count and calculate for a vicious Chinese gambling kingpin. After about a year of this, she gets handed an especially long number to memorize - and then gets snatched again, this time by Russians.
Somehow, she escapes. Somehow, she winds up on the same subway platform as a despondent Luke. He's poised to fling himself in front of the D train when he spots Mei, crushes the men in hot pursuit and thereafter devotes his life to saving her and defeating the bad guys: Chinese and Russians, plus the teeming throngs of corrupt cops and politicians who seem to be running the Big Apple these days. Not only is everyone on the take, everyone is a skilled marksman and murderously effective kick-boxer.
None of this bears much or any resemblance to the real world, but the violence crunches, the editing snaps and the humorous one-liners pop at well-timed junctures.
Amy Biancolli is a Hearst movie writer. firstname.lastname@example.org