1 ½ stars (out of four)
Ryan Reynolds plays Matt Weston, a low-level CIA agent
stationed at a “safe house” in Cape Town, South Africa. A safe house,
apparently, is a run-down building disguising a high-tech interior filled with
surveillance equipment and those interrogation rooms with the two-way mirrors.
The CIA uses these stations to temporarily house detainees before shipping them
elsewhere.
Weston is terribly bored with his work and desperately seeks
a promotion. He pleads on the phone with his superior (Brendan Gleeson) to be
considered for a more active position but is told he just doesn’t have the
necessary experience. One can imagine a similar conversation between Mr.
Reynolds and his agent:
“What about that new romance with Rachel McAdams? I could be
great in that.”
“I’m sorry, Ryan. The studios just don’t think you can carry
the film. But give this action movie a shot. If you can hold your own with
Denzel, I’ll see what I can do for you.”
Mr. Washington is the wonderfully named Tobin Frost, a
former star of the CIA who went rogue years back and started selling sensitive
information to America’s enemies. We see him in a secret meeting with a British
agent who hands him a flash drive that contains a file worth untold millions. When
someone tries to kill Frost (causing quite the traffic mess in downtown Cape
Town), he flees to the American embassy for safety and allows himself to be
arrested.
Government officials are understandably skeptical about
this. Why is he turning himself in now? What’s he got up his sleeve? Until they
can get answers to those questions, they bring Frost to Weston’s safe house.
Weston, who spends a typical shift throwing a tennis ball against the wall and listening
to a teach-yourself French tape (his girlfriend (Nora Arnezeder), seen in few
scenes, is French), can hardly believe such a high-profile target is in his
presence. He is even more surprised when the safe house is attacked and he must
escape with Frost in custody.
Now on the run together, the two men have an opportunity to
get to know each other and Frost wastes no time in starting his mind games. He
taunts Weston and flashes him some of those menacing smiles Denzel Washington
is so good at. In turn, Weston is mostly a nervous wreck and I found it hard
not to interpret Ryan Reynolds’s performance as the actor’s own intimidation in
having to play opposite the Oscar-winner. Weston makes for a lousy protagonist;
as an inexperienced field agent, he is in over his head and so is Mr. Reynolds.
Honestly, is anyone in the audience rooting for him over Denzel?
As previously stated, these scenes only make up one half of Safe
House; the remainder of the film’s time is
relegated to disorienting shaky-cam action. Director Daniel Espinosa is adept
at making the events in his chase scenes unclear and at pushing an already
complicated plot into the realm of the incomprehensible. Determining
who a given shot is focusing on is often difficult and forget trying to understand why anything in
the movie happens.
The higher-ups at the CIA don’t know either and Mr. Gleeson
and Vera Farmiga, a resilient actress who gets stuck playing a lot of
government agent types, spend a fair amount of time speaking in faux-technical
lingo and debating whether or not Weston has gone rogue like Frost. Weston,
meanwhile, screws the pooch time and time again, letting Frost get away, then
capturing him, then letting him get away once more. Few thrillers are this
frantic and yet tedious.
Safe House must have
been a walk in the park for Mr. Washington. He is very good in it but by now he
is a pro at playing the “so bad he’s good” part. He does little here that he
hasn’t already done in better movies. Poor Mr. Reynolds, on the other hand,
struggles to keep pace with him. In one of the final scenes, Weston is seen
bloodied and bruised after a fight, panting and crawling on the ground while a
cool and collected Frost watches from the next room. Rarely do films summarize
themselves so neatly and so perfectly.
- Steve Avigliano, 2/12/12
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