The Ending Of Safe Explained

Superstar Jason Statham has been in his share of over-the-top action extravaganzas. You might know him from his role in cult classics like "Crank" or Sylvester Stallone's "Expendables" films. Outside of his most popular franchises, though, Statham has a number of underrated movies that audiences might be less familiar with, including the 2012 crime drama "Safe," which might be one of the best in that category.

In the film, Statham plays cage fighter Luke Wright, a man with a dark past who gets caught up in a war between the Russian mafia and the Chinese Triad. Wright has the chance to find redemption when he realizes that the two gangs are fighting over the life of a small child named Mei (Catherine Chan). Mei has been brought to America to serve the Triad in their syndicate schemes, and Wright takes it upon himself to save her from getting caught in the crossfire with the Russians — which makes him their newest target.

With a complex, intricately woven plot involving a number of different factions who all want Wright dead, "Safe" will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very end. Through non-stop action sequences, guns-blazing shootouts, reckless car chases, and furious fist fights, the movie is punctuated by surprising twists and turns. Looking to make sense of it all? Well, strap in, because this is the ending of "Safe" explained.

A gritty action-crime drama, "Safe" isn't the kind of straightforward story one would expect from a Jason Statham vehicle. For the first portion of the film, we follow two separate stories, one which involves Luke Wright, a cage fighter on the B-circuit in New Jersey. He refuses to take a dive, though, and costs the Russian mafia boss Emile Docheski (Sandor Tecsy) millions. In the wake of the fight, Docheski's goons force him into exile and threaten to kill anyone he becomes close with. 

Separately we meet little Mei, a young girl in China who is a whiz with numbers and also happens to have a photographic memory. Learning of her talents, the Chinese mafia known as the Triad — led by the cold and calculating Han Jiao (James Hong) — force Mei to work for them, allowing them to track their finances without the risk of computer records. A year later, Mei finds herself working for the Triad in New York City, where she's given a valuable number sequence that will unlock a hidden vault in Chinatown and will be ferried to a secret location to make a handoff with a second party. 

Along the way, though, Mei is intercepted by the Russian mafia, while the Triad's corrupt NYPD allies decide they too want their hands on her. When she finds herself running from the Russians in the NYC subways, she's spotted by Wright, who quickly realizes they have the same enemy.

There are many players involved in "Safe" beyond a simple hero and villain, and their relationships get a little complicated. Chasing down Luke Wright and his young ward Mei are a number of different organizations. The Chinese Triad is in New York's Chinatown, and their big secret is an underground gambling ring that nets them untold millions of dollars every day. Mei is the key to keeping these profits a secret while a group of dirty cops takes a backdoor payout to look the other way on their many illegal activities.

Those same NYPD officers, though, have a vendetta against Wright, who was once one of them, but has since risen to the top of their enemies list. They're in deep with the Russians, and during a key scene where Mei's fate hangs in the balance, the double-dealing cops' allegiance is to the highest bidder. In the end, Mei escapes and winds up under the protection of Wright, which leaves all three organizations out to capture her for their own sinister purposes. 

Led by Captain Wolf (Robert John Burke), the cops are under the direct orders of New York's Mayor Tremello (Chris Sarandon), who seems to know much more about the seedy underbelly of the city than he lets on. But there's also the mysterious agent named Alex (Anson Mount) — an ally to the Mayor — who is as deadly as Wright, as unfeeling as the Triad, and as ruthless as the Russians.

By the end of "Safe," multiple gangs and agents are converging on Wright in an effort to get to Mei. She holds the key to a more than $30 million dollar score in a Chinese vault. But there's a second code and vault belonging to Mayor Tremello which contains information that can take down every criminal organization in the city. Wright knows that to keep Mei safe he's going to have to get the money and the disc before the Russians, which means getting the second code from Alex and killing his way through a horde of Triad goons. 

To do it, Wright must put aside his disdain for the corrupt NYPD cops, who he enlists to help him get to the first vault, getting their cooperation by agreeing to give them the money inside. A fiery shootout ensues, and when they get to the million-dollar score, Wright deftly puts down every one of them except Captain Wolf, who he takes as a hostage alongside Docheski's son. With this newfound cash at his disposal, Wright could leave for parts unknown, but he still worries about Mei's fate. So instead, he uses the money to lure Alex into a final showdown. 

After Alex gives Wright the disc from the second vault, Alex and Wright are ready for a duel to the death when Mei picks up a gun and kills Alex in cold blood. Now, Luke and Mei have $30 million dollars and a disc of dirt on all of the parties involved.

It's a pretty shocking twist when we discover that Luke Wright isn't just a nameless drifter fighting in cage matches to make ends meet. When he's caught by the NYPD, we learn there's a history that goes beyond the ring: He was once one of the city's toughest cops. So what happened that sent him across the river fighting in a cage, where we find him at the mercy of mobsters in New Jersey?

As revealed in a confrontation with those same officers, Wright was thrown off the force after he ratted out his police squad to Internal Affairs for rampant corruption. He'd since become the NYPD's most hated former friend, which is why he left the city entirely. Off their radar for the past few years, Wright has shuffled from odd job to odd job, working as a garbage collector and a low-level fighter. But at the end of "Safe," it's revealed that Wright is even more than just a former NYPD cop, and has lethal skills from an earlier life that make him one of the most dangerous men in the world.

When the NYPD learns that it's Luke Wright who has come to be Mei's protector, Captain Wolf is forced to acknowledge his botched operation to Mayor Tremello. That's when we get a shocking revelation about Luke and his time on the force, which also reveals a dark and violent past.

As Tremello describes, Luke was working for the CIA as a contract killer alongside Alex, who is now working for — and romantically involved with — Mayor Tremello. But when organized crime was skyrocketing in New York, the mayor turned to the CIA, who lent both operatives to the NYPD to secretly take out a number of underworld figures. From high-level mob bosses to drug kingpins, Alex and Luke were a two-man hit squad, and nobody on the force even knew about their secret assassinations.

Unfortunately for the mayor, Luke — unlike Alex — was a killer with a conscience. So when he learned that many of his fellow cops were involved in back alley dealings with those same criminal syndicates, he turned them into Internal Affairs. This put him on the outs with both the CIA and the police, driving him into exile while Alex became the mayor's right-hand man and secret lover.

Early in the film, when Luke Wright downs an opponent in a New Jersey cage match too easily, it's revealed that mobsters had tried to rig the fight against him. Not taking the dive, he cost the Russians millions. In retaliation, they killed Wright's girlfriend and threaten to slice the throat of anyone he ever talks to in the future. But during their meeting in his apartment, Wright never once tries to fight back — even though we later learn that he probably could have taken them all down singlehandedly. 

At the end of "Safe," we learn why he chose not to fight the Russians: As a lethal killer with a conscience, he was actually hoping that the Russians would kill him then and there. Since leaving the NYPD in disgrace, Wright came to lament his days as a government-sanctioned killer and has been living in his own personal guilt-stricken hell. With his unique set of skills he could have gotten work in any number of organizations, but instead turned to menial labor and fighting in the ring. He'd been living an empty life in an attempt to atone for his violent past, and he partly hoped that clash with the Russians was finally a way of ending it all.

If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by dialing 988 or by calling 1-800-273-TALK (8255)​.

"Safe" may not be the most complex in terms of deeper meaning, but the themes that run through the film are just as powerful as the most subtle, allegorical drama. In Luke Wright, we meet a man who is regretful of his past, not because of his actions' illegality, but because of the violent, sordid world he walked in. He spent years wallowing in guilt and misery over his life as a contract killer, finding no purpose or reason to go on. Wright was looking for penance, but what he found was unlikely redemption.

In saving Mei at the end of the film, Wright realizes he can still have a purpose — a way of using his deadly skills for good. He can finally have a measure of justice against the cops who did him wrong, too. He can serve as a lethal guardian to an orphaned young girl, proving that even the hardest life and biggest sins can be atoned for simply by doing good.

He was once a lethal government-contracted killer, sent on missions around the globe to assassinate America's most diabolical enemies. Then he was lent out to the NYPD to put down the biggest threats in organized crime — but Luke Wright is a different kind of hitman. A man with a strict moral code, his sense of right and wrong is finely honed. So when he discovers little Mei is in danger from the same men who want him dead, he has no choice but to act, killing anyone who gets in his way. But once the dust clears, what does it mean for Wright's future?

With a disc containing information that could take down all of his enemies, Wright and Mei head off to an uncertain future, ready to start a new life, assured that nobody will ever come after them. Insisting that he's no father, Wright and Mei seem to agree that they are more like partners. The film's closing moments reinforce this, as the letters sent to the Russians, the Triad, and even the mayor are read in her voice, warning their enemies to steer clear of them or face the consequences.

But what are Wright and Mei partners in exactly? They seem like some kind of odd dynamic duo, possibly vigilante do-gooders. Like "The Equalizer" or "The A-Team," they could become heroes for hire, ready to help those in need. 

At the end of "Safe," Wright and Mei walk off with $30 million, but that's not the end of the road for the money. In a final honorable act, Wright gives Captain Wolf $50,000 dollars for his trouble, returning the remaining $29,950,000 to Han Jiao — its rightful owner — promising to repay the remaining $50,000 with interest. But Jiao isn't out of the woods, because he is warned that Mei has all the information on his business dealings stored in her head and warns that if he comes after her, his "world ends."

Similarly, the Russians know that Wright has the mayor's disc of dirt. And when he pays off Wolf, Wright also lets Docheski's son — who he'd kept as a hostage as collateral — return home unscathed, warning him that the Russians had best leave him and Mei alone. As it stands, all three gangs — the Russians, the Triad, and the NYPD — must now live in fear that Wright could bring them down, but may be powerless to do anything to stop him.

Han Jiao, meanwhile, heads back to China, furious that he's been bested by Wright, and vowing never to return to New York. Plus, his syndicate in the Big Apple is now stuck paying the NYPD a higher percentage of their profits after he's forced to up their payout to convince them to side against the Russians.

For a movie with as many twists and turns as "Safe," one might think that writer-director Boaz Yakin had everything carefully mapped out in a complex outline before he sat down to write his script. But when it came to all the shocking revelations and deadly betrayals at the end, Yakin was surprisingly loose in the writing process. "I made them up as I went along," he told The Film Stage. "I really put myself into the shoes of the two main characters -– and I understood the premise that I was going for -– and then everything that followed was just like, 'Okay, what would somebody do if these people showed up right now?'"

After taking a stab at different routes, Yakin would see how things ended up, and if he wasn't satisfied, went back and tried something else. And as he tells it, it was an intentional part of the process to mimic the feel of Luke Wright's frantic journey from beginning to end. "There was this sort of improvisatory quality that I wanted the film to have because it's about somebody who's improvising through the course of a night," Yakin added.

Known for playing gung-ho action heroes eager to fire off a muzzle full of hot lead, Statham and his role in "Safe" might at first seem the same as the likes of Chev Chelios in "Crank" or Frank Martin in "The Transporter." But the truth is, Luke Wright is a bit different because he's got a heart of gold and a vulnerable side that Statham doesn't get to play very often. And that fact wasn't lost on the actor, who was drawn to that part of the character, who risks everything to save Mei at the end of the film.

"You know, Boaz and [producer] Lawrence Bender ... they actually said, 'You haven't done anything like this. You really must acknowledge the fact that this has all the bells and whistles of what you can do well, but it has so much more underneath,'" Statham said, relaying the conversation in an interview with The Film Stage. According to the actor, it's something that sensitive version of Statham they wanted to see, much to his surprise. "It is definitely a side I never get to play. Vulnerability is not something that's usually ticked on the front of the script."

With Wright ending the film with Mei by his side in a new partnership, is there a chance we could see that vulnerable side again?

Jason Statham has been in his share of franchises, with multiple sequels to "Crank," "The Transporter," and "The Expendables," as well as appearances in "The Fast and the Furious" movies and even his own spin-off, "Hobbes and Shaw." With the kind of ambiguous ending we saw in "Safe," is there a chance we could still see a sequel to that film? Never say never, because Statham himself may have some interest based on comments he made in 2012 when "Safe" was first released.

"I think everyone likes a franchise, don't they? The business part of people you work with are always looking to find something that catches and that has a reason to make another one because financially it's great," he told Den of Geek in a wide-ranging interview. "There's nothing better than having a relative success because it keeps everybody doing what they love doing, so I'm sure there's a real conscious mind to keep things in a way that you can make a franchise, so never die in your film."

Sure enough, Luke Wright is alive and well, and Statham is just as capable of leading an action movie in the 2020s as he was more than a decade ago. And considering his positive experience with "Safe," it still could happen, with director Boaz Yakin reportedly eager to work with him again.