Safe (2012)
Directed by Boaz Yakin
After a former elite agent rescues a 12-year-old Chinese girl who's been abducted, they find themselves in the middle of a standoff between Triads, the Russian Mafia and high-level corrupt New York City politicians and police.
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26 films that influenced Safe
What critics say influenced Safe
The linking of Mr. Kickass and a precocious preteen girl recalls The Professional, only that film did something with its fanciful matchup.
Yakin somewhat goes that route by having the actor spend quieter moments with his young charge, which may remind some viewers with long memories of something similar between Jean Reno and young Natalie Portman in "The Professional."
Safe borrows a modified version of Leon: The Professional 's premise.
The picture could use more scenes like that one, although perhaps Yakin didn’t want to make a retread of Luc Besson’s crazy-wonderful Léon, which paired Jean Reno’s hitman with the littlest hitgal, played by an astonishingly young Natalie Portman.
Borrowing a page from Luc Besson’s “The Professional,” a hyper-intelligent little girl leads Luke out of his depression.
For Statham, the role doesn't venture far from the taciturn territory he occupied in the "Transporter" series, with a touch of "The Professional" given his empathy for this orphaned tyke, whose precociousness proves a hit-miss proposition as the movie progresses.
Yakin's no-nonsense, irony-free direction evokes the gritty, violent action films of the past, from The French Connection to John Woo's Hard-Boiled and The Killer.
Writer/director Boaz Yakin, who debuted with the gritty coming-of-age crime drama Fresh, and somewhere along the line detoured into fluff like Uptown Girls, relies too much on the swooshy hand-held ‘chaos cinema’ camerawork of recent vintage to generate mayhem, but the film also has a distinctly old-school Steven Seagal-circa-Out for Justice vibe that makes all that easier to tolerate.
Luke’s attempt to protect 11-year-old, super-intelligent Mei (Catherine Chan) recalls the 1998 Bruce-Willis-protects-a-code-breaking-boy-with-autism vehicle “Mercury Rising,” a movie I didn’t see but occupied myself trying to remember while Luke was busy punching and shooting in the many sub-standard action sequences writer-director Boaz Yakin coughs up between lines like, “Let’s go to war.”
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Yakin's no-nonsense, irony-free direction evokes the gritty, violent action films of the past, from The French Connection to John Woo's Hard-Boiled and The Killer.
This isn't really a revenge movie � la Charles Bronson's Death Wish films.
British battering ram Jason Statham shows his sensitive side, and tries on an American accent, in " Safe ," an oft-ludicrous but not unengaging action thriller that's at least a partial throwback to old-school B-movies like " Death Wish ," not to mention old-school art-house wanna-B's like Cassavetes ' " Gloria ."
Yakin writes his story into a few corners, and the object of this, again having to do with numbers, is so pedestrian as to remind you the guy wrote “Prince of Persia” and the dreadful “Dirty Dancing” sequel.
Both Docheski and his Chinese counterpart Hang Jiao (veteran Chinese-American stalwart James Hong, alumni of both Chinatown and Blade Runner) covet Mei’s beautiful mind because it contains the secret combination to a fortress-like casino safe where the Triads have stashed a vast fortune.
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Between the steely hero, the seedy sets, Stefan Czapskyâ??s gritty camerawork, Mark Mothersbaughâ??s old-school score, and the considerable body count, it feels like something that Eastwood cranked out in the â??70s, closer in spirit to The Gauntlet than something like Gloria (and pretty undeniably similar to 1994’s The Professional as well).
(So, yes, the movie is also a little bit like " The Gauntlet ," minus the bus and the nudity.
Building the mood out of spare parts from westerns and cop movies from the 1970s (the charging score by Mark Mothersbaugh is a distant cousin to David Shire’s work on “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three”), the filmmaker maintains a steady pace of evasion, keeping Luke and Mei on the run as they figure out a master plan of survival, with the ex-cop firing up his protective instincts to ensure that his young charge remains unharmed and her mental parcel is handled with care.