Safe (2012)

Safe arrives from 2012, a year in which the American action thriller had settled into a comfortable groove, and it does very little to disturb that groove. Jason Statham plays Luke Wright, a former black-ops asset reduced to sleeping in subway stations, who rescues a twelve-year-old Chinese girl from the Russian mafia and spends the remainder of the running time punching his way toward a resolution. Boaz Yakin directs with a lean, unsentimental economy. There are no monologues about the human condition, no third-act plea for tolerance, no moment in which a character turns to the camera and explains what the audience ought to feel. The film's moral universe is simply this: men who hurt children are bad, and Statham will attend to them.

The representational ledger is modest and mostly incidental. The cast is genuinely multiethnic, with Catherine Chan as the child co-lead and Chinese and Russian performers filling out the villainous ranks, but this arrangement follows from a globe-trotting crime plot instead of any deliberate statement. Mei is described as a mathematical prodigy and used as a human calculator, which is a savant device borrowed from a dozen procedurals, not an inquiry into how minds differ. Alex Rosen, the former partner, is identified in a single throwaway clause as the mayor's aide and boyfriend. The film does not linger there. Triads and the Russian mafia appear as ethnic crime syndicates because that is what such films require.

The villainy is municipal graft, corrupt captains and a mayor with a safe full of discs. The film's grievance is directed at dirty cops and bought politicians, a familiar complaint with no interest in the arrangement of wealth itself. What remains is craft. The fights are brutal, the pacing is impatient, and the sentiment is held at arm's length. It is a well-made genre exercise, and it knows better than to lecture.