Safe with Jason Statham

British actor Jason Statham, left and Swedish actor Dolph Lundgren visit members of the Royal Navy at HMS President Royal Navy Reserve headquarters, in London, Monday, Aug. 13, 2012. In the background is Tower Bridge. The two are promoting the film 'Expendables 2'

This picture has nothing to do with the movie, I just thought it was interesting to see how small Jason is, or how big Dolph is, depending on your point of view. We watched Safe (warning: site auto plays) this evening and it was everything we've come to expect from one of Jason's movies. Lot's of people getting beaten up, a few gratuitous killings, and whole slew of bad guys getting shot. There's a plot, or sorts, but mostly it's just an excuse to run around NYC punching and shooting people. I did notice a couple of things. The Russians spoke Russian and the Chinese spoke Chinese. Were there any subtitles? I'm not sure, there may have been some, when it was important, but if you didn't speak the language you were often in the dark, though it was usually pretty obvious what was going on. There was one girl who picked up a gun in the gambling den and promptly got mowed down. Equal opportunity on ethnic and gender basis. Oh, yes, there was one little girl at the focus of the plot. She had a tough role to play. Traumatized, and then alternately pampered and terrorized. And can anyone really tell when someone else is lying?
    There was one clever little bit. Mary Mnemonic (the little girl) has to memorize a really long number. We see that it covers an entire sheet of notebook paper, written in large block letters, but still well over 100 digits long. I'm thinking it's an encryption key, but the little girl notices that there are an unusually large number of 7's and 3's in the number and Jason instantly deduces that it is not just one big number, but a whole series of numbers strung together, and they are in fact the combination to a safe, the 3's and 7's being markers to turn left or right. I don't think I've ever seen a safe that required more than four numbers in the combination, so I'm thinking they padded the number just to muddy the waters. And how do you tell a direction marker 3 or 7 from a digit in the combination? I'm sure it will be explained in the sequel.
    You know, the characters in this story all had names, but I can't recall a single one.