You've got nifty car chases, car crashes, explosions, fist fights, loud gunfire, jumping from roof to roof: what more can a movie lover ask for? Oh, there's more: a top cast including the fabulous Denzel Washington, who can do no wrong, handsome Ryan Reynolds who knows how to grimace and sweat and bleed when he's in pain, some sinister looking people with big guns who never smile or joke, a top CIA executive who shows he means business by never raising his voice. There's some cool photography of Capetown, South Africa, one slum of which can justify an agent's plea that he be reassigned to Paris. I could go on, but getting back to the first question: what more can you ask for?h
MOVIE REVIEW, SAFE HOUSE
Universal Pictures/ Relativity Media
Reviewed for Arizona Reporter by Harvey Karten
Grade: D+ Director: Daniel Espinosa Screenwriter: David Guggenheim Cast: Denzel Washington, Ryan Reynolds, Brendan Gleeson, Liam Cunningham, Sam Shepard, Vera Farmiga Screened at: AMC Lincoln Square, NYC, 2/6/12 Opens: February 10, 2012
You could want some extended conversations: more people get killed in midsentence than have been taken out in any other movie I've seen. You could want subtlety and nuance in writing. You could want a script that makes a modicum of sense while still allowing enough of a twist near the conclusion. You could ask that at least somebody, anybody, might use a silencer on his gun because those gunshots are loud, man. You could want to interview the actors asking why they're so desperate for money that they signed on to this picture--particularly Vera Farmiga, who made a reputation by appearing in quite a few intelligent films like "Up in the Air" and, to be released later, "A View from the Bridge." And is Sam Shepard, who has written for us such imaginative plays as "True West" and "Curse of the Starving Class" able to keep a straight face throughout this mayhem? That's to his credit.
The film, which bears not a smidgen of originality--corrupt government officials, the aforementioned noisy scenes, a shaky camera, a vicious manhunt--is largely a two-actor thriller pitting Ryan Reynolds' Matt Weston against Denzel Washington's Tobin Frost. Frost, a renegade CIA operative who has betrayed his country by selling secrets to the enemy, is being pursued by a motley crew of assassins and government officials who seek information to which Frost is privy. When a safe house in Capetown is invaded by people who want Frost alive, Matt Weston is directed by CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to transport him under handcuffs to another location. If he can do this successfully, he can say goodbye to Capetown, hello Paris. Thoroughly bloodied by not bent, Matt Weston, who plays straight man to Tobin Frost's wiseacre, did not know how lucky he had been when he was going nuts as a safe house caretaker whose only function was to look at four walls and throw a ball back and forth.
"Safe House" lovers might change their affections if they looked back at some of the great spy movies of yesteryear, particularly Sydney Pollack's "Three Days of the Condor" (The CIA knows him as Condor. What he knows about the CIA could make him an endangered species.) Sound familiar? "Safe House" could actually make one relish even a confused and confusing "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy." It's quiet.
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MOVIE REVIEW, SAFE HOUSE
