2012 in Film: Safe

Safe is basically a movie about fuck cops and #nodads. It also is a movie about some really cool action sequences, a self-consciously thin plot, and some unselfconsciously shitty racial stereotypes. I assume it was generally disliked by critics because the racism wasn't quite strong enough, in the final calculations, to counterbalance the fact that it didn't worship cops.

So Statham is a cage fighter who used to work as a semi-official assassin for the police, but got kicked out for ratting on his coworkers. Then THE RUSSIANS killed his wife and made his life a living hell because he failed to throw a fight. Then he tries to kill himself but sees a little Chinese girl running from THE RUSSIANS so he saves her & it turns out she has a Super Secret Number memorized because she's (you guessed it) a math genius, and then he protects her as THE RUSSIANS, THE CHINESE, and the crooked cops try to get her. He kills a bunch of dudes and then finds out the safe that the numbers unlock has like hella cash and something like The Entire Collected Knowledge Of The DHS, In Convenient Disk Form. Then the mayor's aide & gay lover fights a bunch of dudes & goes to fight Statham but Mei shoots him so Statham wins, and is like hey kid I'd be a shitty dad and she's like yeah fuck having a dad and hes like alright cool lets go to Seattle.

Honestly I don't really know what to say beyond that. Until I reread the plot synopsis I remembered literally nothing about this movie -- less even than I remembered about John Carter. I am not particularly well versed in action films, and I can't think of any other Statham movies I have ever seen. Was he in District B-13 or whatever that was called? I don't remember anything about that one either.

I am really out of my element here. I'm not even sure why I am trying to write this. I think the only genre I am less familiar with is comedy, because comedy is awful. Oh god the Men in Black 3 review is going to be such a disaster.

The cops in this movie are pretty unrelentigly shitty. Also one of them is stuffed into a trunk for the last like half hour of the film. The mayor almost gets stuffed in there too but they chickened out, which was really unfortunate, but he does get knocked out. The way the plot advanced seemed actively funny to me while I was watching it, in a pleasant way, especially the scene where Statham cracks the cipher effortlessly in the Hotel room while he is like fortifying it or whatever. The whole thing just deeply did not give a fuck about you and that was kind of wonderful. I literally don't remember anything about the cinematography, or the sets, or anything. Jesus man narrative analysis is so fucking boring how do people write this shit.