September 5th, 2011 at 10:30 am by
Sheri

“Sometimes a chance meeting can save your life.”
Last month we brought you a first look at the poster and now there are a few new stills for Boaz Yakin’s Safe, starring that stubble-covered hunk of testosterone, Jason Statham.
The official Lionsgate synopsis: “Mei (Catherine Chan) is a 10 year-old Chinese math prodigy who is abducted from her home in Nanjing by the Triads; she is sent to America by the Triad Leader Han Jiao (James Hong), where she will serve as a “counter” for their extortion racquets. No computers, no paper trails – she keeps all the numbers in her head. One year later, Mei’s new adopted “father” Chang (Reggie Lee) brings her along to count the numbers as he shakes-down his business operations.
Luke Wright (Jason Statham) is a second rate cage fighter in the mixed martial arts circuit in New Jersey. When he blows a rigged fight, the Russian mafia make an example of him – murdering his wife and threatening to kill anyone he forms any kind of friendship or relationship with. Now homeless, destitute and completely isolated from society, Luke wanders the streets of New York like a ghost, hovering on the edge of suicide.
Big things begin to stir in the city, when Triad boss Han Jiao appears in New York, and gives Mei a secret number to memorize; on her way to use this number for an unknown purpose, Mei is violently kidnapped from the Triads by the Russian Mafia, who want the information she now has in her head— as does the corrupt Captain Wolf (Robert John Burke) of the NYPD. Mei manages to escape, but she won’t be able to survive on her own for long.
Standing on a subway platform ready to throw himself under a train, Luke Wright sees the young and terrified Chinese girl being pursued by Russian thugs… he knows something is wrong, and he knows now he has to make a decision: continue on his downward spiral, or come back fighting in order to help a little girl he’s never even met. Luke comes back to life, forcing himself into violent action, and over the course of one harrowing night he tears a swath through the city’s underworld in order to save Mei’s life and redeem his own.”
Well! That sounds like fun! Seriously, there are so many triggers in those paragraphs I don’t even care what it’s about as long as ‘The Stath’ is involved and gets to be all…’Stath-y’. Do you? Didn’t think so.
Here’s the bad news. Lionsgate had originally scheduled this for a late October release, but it was just announced, due to their already packed fall slate (so packed they had to pass on domestic distribution of Marc Forster’s Machine Gun Preacher to Relativity), they are pushing it back to March 2, 2012. Well, at least it’s not the dreaded January so they must still have some faith in it and just don’t want it to get lost. That and so we don’t go into Stath overload. Killer Elite comes out two weeks before the original Safe date. (Too much hotness all at once and we become immune. We don’t want an recurrence of ‘Gerard Butler syndrome’. Remember when he had three films come out within weeks of each other? The press and the public are fickle. They can turn on you…*snaps fingers* like that. BTW-I told you all roads lead to G. Believe me yet?)
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