Safe - Blu-ray Review

'Yakin's film is playing everything exactly the way of its title'

'I've been in restaurants all night. All I got served was lead', growls Jason Statham, during the start of the third act of Safe, one of a handful of awful one-liners scattered throughout the film. In his now lengthy career, The Stath has a mixed record with one-liners, from the sublime (Snatch) to the 'I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry' (Crank). Can a film be judged on one-liner quality? Lets find out.

Some one-liners are born into brilliance at the moment pen hits page ('I'll be back'), some arrive kicking and screaming, negotiating their way to the top through delivery and time spent being repeated by others ('put the cookie down'), others are just awful at birth, destined never to go anywhere. Safe is full of the latter kind.

Writer/director Boaz Yakin is much better at creating a skipping narrative which jumps between focuses and characters, charting a course which should keep us interested, as Luke Wright (Statham) attempts to keep ahead of mobsters, corrupt cops and a very clever little girl.

The execution though, is muddled. The quick jumps between the character keep us off-guard but also uninvolved. There's not enough Statham in the early sections to hook us into Wright, who remains just another anonymous vehicle throughout, spouting awful lines at an increasingly regular pace until he reaches zenith in the final third, murmuring un-funny, unconvincing meaty mouthfuls that wallow around in his gob and emerge as something approaching spittle. It makes Safe a frustrating, shallow, grubby watch, at home in the company of paper thin actions films of recent years like Dwayne Johnson's Faster.

It doesn't help that, at times, Safe looks to be of bargain basement-level production standard. A major car chase is almost entirely filmed in close-up, cars careening over and off things with barely a scratch or an impact. Its endemic of the fact that Yakin's film is playing everything exactly the way of its title, deflecting the more interesting ideas into the gutter, as Wright graduates to least interesting action lead character for some time.

By Sam Turner. Sam is editor of Film Intel, and can usually be found behind a keyboard with a cup of tea. He likes entertaining films and dislikes the other kind. He's on Google+, Twitter and several places even he doesn't yet know about.