Safe (2012)

I didn't have much time for movies this week. Actually, since a while I'm pretty much stuck with TWD and "sleeping pills" made in Hong Kong, where I didn't catch anything to worth an entry. The most recent seen title outside these categories would be "Safe", a leftover in an old "to watch" list, 7 years already from its release date... Time flies by.

The synopsis could directly reference "Mercury Rising", but in a more action packed version I guess. I'm not remembering anything else from "Mercury Rising" besides that Bruce Willis had to protect a gifted boy tracked by some bad guys from NSA for breaking some code, and also that the movie was pretty bad. In "Safe", Jason Statham has to protect a gifted girl tracked by some bad guys from the Russian mafia, the Chinese triads, and from NYPD for being the only one who knows some very long number - also a code in the end, and the movie was so & so. "The hero" here is some former mysterious agent in the US security structures, who became a cop, who became a MMA fighter, who became homeless, who (almost) became suicidal in a metro station, where he has a sudden revelation that all this career chain ends better with a bodyguard position.

Unfortunately the kid character in "Safe" is very under-used in the story, not having almost any effective involvement in the action in respect to the capacity she possesses, even though this is the main reason why everybody fights for her. On the other hand, although you might think that "Safe" is just another 1h30m of mindless action, it's not really like that - indeed, we have a quite a bunch of bullets fired, and Jason Statham displays all his kung-fu skills, but besides that we do have a story where new elements are dropped with a reasonable frequency to keep you from getting bored. Overall, it works well for a light summer movie...

Rating: 3 out of 5