Film Review: Safe

Certificate: 15 (strong violence throughout, and language)
Directed By: Boaz Yakin
Cast: Jason Statham, Catharine Chan, Robert John Burke, Reggie Lee, James Hong, Anson Mount, Chris Sarandon, Joseph Sikora
Budget: $30 million
Runtime: 94 minutes
Trailer: Watch

The Stath is back in a completely different role to what we're used to seeing. Oh wait, no he isn't. Once again Jason Statham takes to punching people across rooms where in a paltry ninety-four minutes he manages to eliminate half the inhabitants of New York.

Cop-turned-cage-fighter (haha) Luke Wright (Statham) unwittingly gets the wrong side of the Russian mob, who inflict revenge by murdering his wife. But when Luke once again inadvertently crosses the crazy Ivans chasing 10-year old Chinese maths prodigy Mei (Chan), he soon finds himself embroiled in the middle of a three-way tug of war between the Ruskies, the Triads and crooked cops.

Safe is a throwback to action movies of the seventies and eighties. Action is set to maximum while plot and dialogue are on mute. This is unashamedly a ginormous cliche of stock foreign gangsters, wisecracking sidekicks and inordinate body counts. There's some fluff of a subtext about redemption and all that, but Safe is proper old skool. However, not always in a good way; more like an amalgamation of every Arnie, Stallone and Van Damme 'script' rolled into one tawdry homage. And no, I don't mean The Expendables. The main problem here is that proceedings don't seem to transition smoothly as frenetic action sequences appear more like missions in Grand Theft Auto. There's even a car jacking scene identical to that in the game.

Safe is rough around the edges and horribly dated, but it does have its moments in providing decent bouts of nostalgia to satiate eighties action movie junkies. Action scenes are efficient while the Stath's one-liners never cease to amuse. And let's be honest here, you can't really hold such brainless bravado movies against Statham. He gives the audience what they want without any art house pretentions. This is very much a film where you call the lads round and order a pizza.

Expendables 2 Trailer

Looking impossibly more ridiculous than the first. Should be great!

Expendables 2 Movie Poster

Fuckin' A! Why Jet Li looks like a Chinese woman however is beyond me...

;)

Film Review: Blitz

Sergeant Tom Brant (Statham) is the plod's 'unorthodox' arm of the law. When a crazed lunatic calling himself 'The Blitz' (Gillen) begins killing coppers, Brant and gay detective Porter Nash (Considine) must use unconventional methods to capture him before more die.

To put it bluntly, Blitz is shit. The dialogue is cheesy, there are plot holes galore, and the characters are so rigid that it's difficult to watch without wincing. It features a completely superfluous side-story arc involving a drug-addicted officer (Ashton) which is so needless and melodramatic that it detracts from the film at large and threatens to usurp the main plot. However, Blitz has maybe two things going for it. First, it has incredibly slick cinematography, adding an essence of gritty realism to the streets of London. Second, it is well paced, which almost makes the rest of it tolerable in that you need not spend too much time contemplating the bullshit just thrown at you.

There are no real character explorations; Sergeant Brant for example is an arsehole just because he's an arsehole. While there may be a glint in Statham's eye that he's enjoying the absurdity of everything, the ultimate impression is that rather than taking the role seriously he's just having a bit of fun. As far as Statham's violent reptoire goes Blitz actually seems to subdue his violence skills, reduced to only a few scenes of bar-brawl type fisticuffs. His by the book partner, Considine's Nash, is gay, thus naturally suffers abuse from his colleagues at the station, and Zawe Ashton is terribly cast as PC Elizabeth Falls, a wholly unbelievable character who bears similarity to a plank of wood. Gillen's cop killer Barry Weiss seems to be the only one taking it all seriously, displaying shades of the Dark Knight's Joker. However, his character's motivations are weak and doesn't do anything fundamentally new with the psychotic criminal role.

Blitz almost succeeds as a reasonable throwaway romp, but it suffers from sitting on the fence. Indeed, it is never entirely sure what it wants to be; sometimes passing serious, damning indictments on the police and acting as a social commentary, other times becoming a melodramatic farce. You'll get what you expect in a stoic hardnut like Statham doing what he does best - sort of - but Blitz is ultimately unedifying, lacking any conviction as to its purpose.

Film Review: The Expendables

A rogue CIA agent turned drug lord (Roberts) has funded a coup on a small island in the Gulf of Mexico through his puppet, General Garza (Zayas). Letting his emotions get the better of him upon seeing the state of the island, Barney Ross (Stallone) and his gang of washed-up ageing mercenaries return to wreak destruction on the bad guys. The plot is, quite frankly, a bloody load of shit. But let's be honest, you didn't come to see that, did you? To be perfectly clear here, by critical standards this is a terrible film. Deep, winding character arcs, Oscar-worthy performances and clever writing there is not. Neither is this a parody of those 80s action films like Commando and Rambo we grew up with. Rather, The Expendables is a film that could easily have come from the decade itself. It is a raucous ride fuelled with testosterone, coated in nostalgia with a sprinkling of dynamite.

All the characters in this film are incredibly generic, one-dimensional beings. There's the short guy, subject to the same joke throughout the film (Jet Li), the guy with the cauliflower ear (Couture), the obligatory huge black dude with a love of heavy weaponry (Crews), the wise old sage (Rourke), whose role is surprisingly rather small in this, and the inevitable member of the team you can never trust (Lundgren). One can only reason that if you're going to cast every action star on the planet in the same film then there really isn't going to be much room to manoeuvre around all the huge egos. For this film to be truly complete it would only have needed the presences of Jean Claude Van Damme, Couture's role evidently penned for him, and that weirdo Steven Seagal, both whom turned down Stallone's best efforts to sign them. Roberts is perfectly cast as the 'sophisticated' slime-ball bad guy accompanied by his massive bodyguard in the form of cueball 'Stone Cold' Steve Austin. David Zayas' tinpot dictator, General Garza - whom you may recognise from the TV series Dexter - is just one big fat cliché. Indeed, everyone else takes a back seat to Stallone and Statham who actually make for a pretty entertaining duo on screen. There was definitely a little spark between the two, notably where in one scene Statham's Lee Christmas introduces himself as 'Buda' and Stallone as 'Pest'. Honestly, it's funnier than it sounds.

Of course, the talking point on everyone's lips was the inclusion of the Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mr 'Die Hard' Bruce Willis. If Stallone had left it a secret for audiences to see in the theatre then you may have been forgiven for thinking this wasn't merely a bad publicity stunt. Cheekily however Stallone marketed the entire film on this 'gimmick', displaying it for the cheesy nostalgia fest it really is from the word 'go'. The scene itself adds absolutely nothing to the plot (or lack of) and one might easily be mistaken for thinking it no different to one of their Planet Hollywood gatherings. It really is full strength cheddar, but if you grew up with these bad-asses it is also jaw-droppingly cool. Even though the acting is so contrived and wooden it is nonetheless highly amusing to watch these ridiculously jacked geriatrics taking pot-shots at one-another, particularly one of Stallone's jibes at the Austrian behemoth.

As far as action sequences go The Expendables is absolutely insane where everything in this film defies logic. From Stallone running about 20 feet behind a plane and then making some immense jump to 'just' latch on, to the subsequent aircraft strafing the island's pier, to a moment involving Stallone, Crews, an artillery shell and a helicopter. It really is just preposterous. As well as explosions and big guns, the hand-to-hand combat is brutally awesome as you flinch with each bone-crunching twist. I literally pissed myself laughing at a part where Crews, wielding a huge shotgun, rampages down a tunnel blasting away generic soldiers. I'm fully expecting an amusing .gif of this to be present on the internet very soon.

Stallone is not the brainless muscle-bound idiot some people would believe. His career has actually seen some very poignant works and great pieces of writing. The Expendables however does not rank up among them. Is this a good film? Probably not. Entertaining? Hell yeah!