Safe House is a pretender. While it may look like a decent spy thriller, with its Bourne Identity-inspired car chases and hand-to-hand combat, the movie goes through the motions, content to be knock-off of the franchise that made Matt Damon out to be an action star instead of trying to stand alone.
Our hero, Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds), is a bottom feeder for the Central Intelligence Agency. He’s so far down on the rung that he can’t even get a caseworker assignment in the Paris branch. Instead, Weston is a glorified housesitter in an empty apartment wing in Cape Town, South Africa. Internally, he’s chomping at the bit to prove his worth. Until that moment arrives, though, he must settle for maintaining the safe house, making sure everything is in working order – security cameras, snack foods and (most importantly) plenty of cream for the coffee! All he’s asked to do is be at the ready in the event a valued asset is transferred to the facility to be interrogated through waterboarding. But it’s been months without any new arrivals. At least Weston’s hand-eye coordination hasn’t gone to waste; when bored, he throws a tennis ball across a room and catches it on the way back. Nothing exciting ever happens.
Then the safe house takes in Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington), the CIA bogeyman that everyone apparently fears, who was also one of the Agency’s elite operatives until he went off the grid a decade ago. His resurfacing in Cape Town and later walk-in to the U.S. Consulate in South Africa sets off all kinds of red flags, but by that point we already know more than the entire defense department. Never a good move if the intent of the spy thriller is to keep the audience on its toes.
It isn’t long after his arrival that the safe house is cracked by a hit squad and Weston has to make haste with a handcuffed Frost in the trunk of a commandeered BMW. Such a quick transition, one can’t help think the filmmakers missed a golden opportunity to make the most of Frost’s psychological expertise to turn the tables on his interrogators prior to the firefight. While he does make an informed remark about the grades of towels used to administer the waterboarding, psychoanalysis is undervalued and is replaced with more hairy situations that involve any combination of the two principal stars.
On the surface, Safe House should be firecracker entertainment. But it’s a makeshift production that overvalues the need for frenetic action as opposed to dialogue and story. When I learned Denzel Washington helped to shape the story over a six-month period – newsflash: several A-list stars have carte blanche when it comes to rewriting their roles – it just instills the idea that there was probably a good movie here that lost focus with its uneven pace, textbook double-cross fakes, and an anticlimactic ending. Even the film’s title sounds weak. Call it what it is: Denzel Washington Kicks a Lot of Ass.
David Guggenheim’s screenplay does little to the spy thriller genre that we haven’t already seen. Though to his credit he does not try to create a buddy dynamic between the two leads, which backfires since there’s a lack of spontaneity. Reynolds and Washington are adversarial all the way to the almost end. Their character interactions bare some resemblance to Christian Bale and Russell Crowe in 3:10 to Yuma. Even when the story becomes Weston having to move Frost to another safe house the 3:10 comparison is warranted. Still, unlike the western, where Bale and Crowe’s interaction only strengthens as the story progresses, Reynolds and Washington are merely sharing space on screen.
For Denzel Washington, Safe House is another in a line of throwaway films where he’s played characters with limited reach. His Tobin Frost, while a clear and present danger to the guys back in Langley, isn’t likely to be recalled when discussing the actor’s more memorable roles. Although his cool, confident composure, even when thrown into a new action scene every ten minutes, is more reassuring than the push for Ryan Reynolds to be a mega action star. He may have the physique but he would play better as the deadly, erudite sidekick (think Windsor Horne Lockwood III from Harlan Coben’s Myron Bolitar novels).
In a year that has seen the box office dominated by restricted features, Safe House is likely to continue the streak. Denzel Washington is a movie star that crosses generations and race, and Ryan Reynolds is a matinee idol that brings sex appeal so to the studio that’s a win-win. Hopefully by summer’s end, though, the true Bourne Identity spin-off (The Bourne Legacy) will supplant it as the better spy thriller.
Director: Daniel Espinosa
Notable Cast: Denzel Washington, Ryan Reynolds, Brendan Gleeson, Vera Farmiga, Sam Shepard, Robert Patrick, Nora Arnezeder
Writer(s): David Guggenheim
