Safe

Safe (2012) is set in New York. A Chinese gang uses a young girl who memorises numbers; she is carrying a safe combination in her head, and the Russian mob and corrupt police want the same combination. A former cage fighter who has lost everything sees her on the subway and intervenes. Boaz Yakin wrote and directed. He is better known as a screenwriter and had made Remember the Titans; here he moves fully into genre. The best decision in it is refusing to explain. Statham's backstory is delivered in fragments across the first twenty minutes, between fights, and the film never pauses to lay it out. The fights are deliberately short and ugly, choreographed as encounters that end quickly rather than as spectacle. It runs 94 minutes. Good for: direct action, Jason Statham, and short fast genre films. Less good for: there are three separate factions and the connections between them are needlessly tangled. The Chinese and Russian characters are written entirely from stock. The girl is not a character but an object the plot moves around.