Seeems they snuck it past almost everyone but...
A safe combination is only six digits, 9 if you count the "left" and "right" Statham mentions. If Mei had to decode some larger number to get the true combination, it's not mentioned at all.
shareNo, it all made sense.
Mei said that most of the digits were random (meaningless filler). Only numbers following a 3 or a 7 corresponded to one of the safe combo numbers. So 346 would be code for "right 46" or "left 46". Most of the code was garbage. Only six (if the safe had six digits in its combination as you said) three digit strings were important.
Because of the ambiguity in left and right, that's why Jason's character had to make 2 attempts to open the safe. Like he said, he had to swap left and right on the do-over.
{Sigh}...no.
She says that 3s and 7s stand out because they occur too often to be random. What she doesn't say is that the next two digits are significantly associated with those 3s and 7s (to form a safe combination). It could have been a 3 followed by 16 encoded digits that reduce to two, or any number of other possibilities. Of course, maybe the digits were grouped in threes on the page, but the film doesn't say.
The point is this: the code is a major plot device - it's length, complexity, and importance are alluded to over and over. For a random knockaround guy to then correctly decipher it's obscure meaning - that it is, of all things, the combination to a safe - and then decipher the actual code itself, all without even seeing it and in the space of a few seconds just because it has a lot of 3s and 7s - too big a leap much too quickly, even for an action film.
However one chooses to slice it, this scene as a whole was ridiculous. More importantly for you, vehemently defending the realism of any scene in any film with even a vague tonal similarity to this one = major facepalm.
You watching a Jason Statham movie and expecting realism is ridiculous. Of course it's a plot device. That's the thing with movies like this: they promise to deliver action, nothing more, nothing less. It's not a 'thinking movie' nor does it pretend to be. If you're okay with that, this is an entertaining way to kill a couple of hours. I for one didn't bother myself with pointless details; instead I focused on the real story, which was about Luke and Mei.
If you expect some brain training exercise, you're better off buying a Rubik's cube. Or if you want a real challenge, teach yourself to calculate on which day every date falls, whether it's from the past or the future. That should occupy you for a while. It's pointless, but so is making a fuss about details that don't matter.
Well actually, leaving reality aside because I agree it has no place in a Statham movie, it was still plausible in context of this movie. You say "a random knockaround guy," however the mayor made it clear that Luke was no such thing. He was "a ghost," "a guy with connections," and he knew Russian so he it stands to reason he'd infiltrated them before and could have been familiar with their version of codes, in his previous life.
shareYeah truth is Luke was most likely a gov assasin gone freelance, the turned cop then cage fighter. So he could easily break a simple code like that, moreso he would have studied the major criminal groups beforehand, which is why he says "old school", he'd read about this stuff done before.
This is also why he could scare the russian mob head so much, he'd already mapped and studied his organization before hand.