No laughs when Jason's around

Safe sees Jason Statham on familiar ground – a violent bloodfest
Review rating *
If, one of these days, you see Jason Statham looking cheerful in a film, it either means he has just been told the weekend gross, or he has just broken some poor person’s neck in a particularly inventive way.
Whatever the reason for cheerfulness, you will find no such emotion in Safe, a voyage into the world of pain, slick moves and wild chases that is your genre-standard action movie.
Eshewing the trappings of luxury in his Transporter mode, in Safe he plays Luke Wright, a brutal cage boxer with a shadowy past who makes the mistake of annoying the Russian Mafia.
They want him to fix a fight but he decides not to and so costs the mob some money which they collect on in typical fashion by murdering his family.
Like most tough guys he seems to get over the murder of wife and child very quickly, redeemed apparently by the sight of a small Chinese girl being chased by the aforementioned Mafia.
He then saves the girl by putting some stick about, not realising that she is a human computer used by the Triads in their business dealings.
Thus he is battling Russians with heavy weaponry, Triads with kickboxing pretensions and, oh, I forgot, there’s a bunch of corrupt New York cops on his tail as well.
It all adds up to familiar territory for Mr Statham.
Director/writer Boaz Yakin, who has a long history of writing and directing similar action movies, keeps things humming along nicely, with plenty of blood and violence. The body count in fact is close to three figures - high by even this genre’s standards.
Lighter touches are provided by the girl, played with lippy attitude by Catherine Chan. The villains are suitably heavy and psychotic and there is an attempt at a political sub-plot but this doesn’t add any great depth, just provides a couple of narrative loose ends that those paying close attention will spot, confirming the suspicion that this is standard fare with no great pretensions.