Safe - Death Proof

Former cop Luke Wright (Jason Statham) has always tried to stay on the straight and narrow. For that, he had to pay a heavy price. First, his sense of justice cost him his job. And when he then also sends his opponent to the boards in what should have been a mixed martial arts fight, costing the Russian mafia a lot of money, his wife is also taken from him. And as the killers make it clear to Luke that from now on anyone the ex-cop gets too close to will suffer a similar fate, Luke withdraws completely from his normal life and from now on lives inconspicuously on the streets of New York. But then he meets the ten-year-old girl Mei (Catherine Chan), who has been kidnapped by the triad leader Han Jiao (James Hong) to America because of her mathematical talents and has also become the target of the Russian mafia there. Luke takes the girl into his care and vows to protect her with his life, which is worthless to him. But as not only the Chinese triads and the Russian mafia are after the combination of numbers the girl has stored in her memory, a breathless escape through New York soon begins, in which Luke has to prove more than once his skills as a tough fighter and ingenious strategist...

With Safe - Death Proof, the successful screenwriter (Prince of Persia) and producer (Hostel) Boaz Yakin delivers his latest directorial work, in which action star Jason Statham may once again show his mimic expressionless, but particularly powerful side. So it is the action and fight sequences in this film are well worth seeing, even if Yakin relies here and there a little too much on crude brutality and seems to lose sight of the story completely.

Here the flick also has its biggest weak points to record. At the beginning, a plot framework is built up based on some flashbacks, which seems to be very complex, but proves to be extremely thin upon closer inspection. The long, unnecessarily complicated introduction could therefore have been presented in a much more streamlined manner, or perhaps even just covered in a few explanatory sentences. But what Yakin carefully sets up in the first 30 minutes feels more like something borrowed from an 80s video production starring Lorenzo Lamas or Jean-Claude Van Damme, which then carries over to the occasionally violent action sequences. Safe - Todsicher often just doesn't feel contemporary, but exudes the charm of movies that weren't really good even in their heyday.

The only thing that saves the film from its complete irrelevance is Jason Statham. The Crank star is just a cool ass and a good action star. Watching him beat the crap out of bad guys and have to team up with his old colleagues, all of whom want him to go to hell, to give the head villain a full broadside is fun enough. But it's just not enough to justify buying a movie ticket. Because the many dramaturgical lengths, especially at the beginning, and the cliché-heavy, low-surprise story stifle any nascent entertainment value before it can fully unfold.

Whoever likes simple 80s action, like you could once find on the shelves of video stores by the dozens, might feel well entertained here. But for those for whom a powerful hitting Jason Statham is not enough and who maybe hoped for some suspense, wit and originality, there is only one thing that is dead certain: it is completely enough to wait for the DVD release of the film, because despite some good sequences Safe - Todsicher is in the end only very conditionally worth seeing!

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp