REVIEW: Safe House

Safe House (2012): Dir. Daniel Espinosa. Written by: David Guggenheim. Starring: Denzel Washington, Ryan Reynolds, Brendan Gleeson, Vera Farmiga and Nora Arnezeder. Rated R (Stabbings, shootings, blood and bruisings). Running time: 117 minutes.

1 ½ stars (out of four)

There are two kinds of scenes in Safe House, a new thriller cobbled from used parts of the Bourne movies and TV’s 24. There are action scenes (I’ll get to those later) and there are tense exchanges between its two leads, Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds. We’ve seen movies like this before. Where two stars go mano-a-mano, one playing a cop, the other a criminal. The formula is very effective when you have two equally compelling actors playing off each other and much less so when one half of the duo is lacking.

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

Why They Suck: The Two Breeds of Bad Movies

By now most critics and organizations have published their picks for the best movies of the year. Typically, I wait until February to make my Top 10 list so that I have an opportunity to catch up on holiday releases and movies I missed in theaters. In the meantime though, I’d like to take a moment to discuss a few 2011 films on the opposite end of the qualitative spectrum – the bad ones.

Not all bad movies are made alike and for me the sea of duds divides into two categories: artistic failures and commercial failures. Since cinema is as much a business as it is an art form, all movies must straddle this line. A.O. Scott summarizes the point nicely. “No filmmaker sets out to make a bad movie,” he says, “and no producer or studio executive sets out to lose money.”

Of course, bad movies still get made. Loads of them. And I find that a clunker’s failings can usually be attributed to choices made on one side or the other of the aforementioned balancing act.

The first example in this case study is Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, a truly awful bomb from earlier this year that I chalk up as an artistic failure. True, this orgy of computer animation could not have happened without major studio backing, but it was also the first opportunity Mr. Snyder had to develop an original story rather than work from previous source material. After making a series of hits within the studio system (Dawn of the Dead, 300 and, to a lesser degree, Watchmen), he was given creative license to direct another, this time from the ground up.

The result is a bombastic blast of misogyny that pitifully vies for fanboy love by emulating every known geek-approved genre and blending them into a self-absorbed mess. It is Kill Bill with none of Quentin Tarantino’s levity or reverence for his female leads. Still, Sucker Punch is the kind of disaster that can only come from someone with a bold, if perhaps misguided, vision, and it is endlessly more watchable than the alternative.

Enter Exhibit #2: Green Lantern, a movie that, on first glance, appears to have all the necessary components of a successful superhero origin story. Beneath the surface, however, the film is empty and hollow; it has no heart, no humor. The same may be said of its star, Ryan Reynolds, whose good looks are a shell that hides an utter vacancy of charm. There is no drive, or purpose, or love of the character behind the production.

The movie is the result of a green-lighting frenzy that occurred in the years following Spider-Man’s $100M+ opening box office weekend nearly a decade ago. Every studio had to have a superhero franchise they could bank on for huge profit. Five or six, if possible. Green Lantern is a product designed to sell Burger King onion rings as much as tickets. I would happily rewatch Sucker Punch, the badness of which has a kind of operatic grandeur to it, than endure the stale lifelessness of Green Lantern again.

My point is, both films suck, but one had the potential to not, while the other was doomed to fail. You can feel Mr. Snyder’s enthusiasm brimming from every over-stylized, color-saturated shot of Sucker Punch. This is part of the reason why, when it stumbles, it doesn’t do so gracefully. It smacks hard, face-first on the pavement. But no one can accuse Mr. Snyder of not making bold choices, something the by-the-numbers Green Lantern lacks. His choices are, for the most part, bad choices but he took a chance, a tactic that can lead to great success in a way that playing it safe never can.

I’ll leave open the possibility that Zack Snyder may yet make a great film or, at least, a few very good ones. Even taking into account a hunk of junk like Sucker Punch, he is on the right track. On the other hand, the only good that can come of Green Lantern 2, should it ever get made, will be the return of avocado paste at Subway. (I’m a big guacamole fan.)

- Steve Avigliano, 1/13/12

REVIEW: Green Lantern

Green Lantern (2011): Dir. Martin Campbell. Screenplay by: Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim and Michael Goldenberg. Story by: Greg Berlanti, Michael Green and Marc Guggenheim. Based on the comics by: John Broome and Gil Kane. Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard and Mark Strong. Rated PG-13 (intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action). Running time: 114 minutes.

1 star (out of four)

Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) has the power to create anything he wants to fight his enemies with. Let that sink in for a moment. Anything. When called upon to use this power, he creates a chainsaw, a machine gun, a really big fist. If you were given the ability to create anything at all out of nothing, wouldn’t you feel obligated to be a little more creative than that?

Green Lantern is an uninspired bore; its script seems to have been written by someone who saw Spider-Man once and was asked to copy the structure of its superhero origin story from memory. Hal Jordan, a cocky Air Force pilot, is the unlikely recipient of a green ring that bears with it great responsibility. Jordan has been chosen by the ring’s magical powers to become a Green Lantern – a Guardian of the Universe – and we all know that you can’t argue with a magic ring’s decision.

In many recent superhero movies, there has been a touch of much-needed self-awareness. Audiences cannot be expected to sit through film after film of increasingly silly heroes without those films acknowledging that maybe these stories are a little silly. There are moments when Green Lantern tries this but more often these scenes come across as lazy writing. When Jordan is given the ring by an alien who crash-lands on Earth, he immediately calls his friend to the crash site and the following exchange occurs:

“Is that a spaceship?”

“Yeah.”

“Is it real?”

“Yeah.”

There is no sense of wonder or excitement in Green Lantern, just the obligatory motions of a story that is being told… Why? To ensure that the ever-profitable mines of superhero lore have been thoroughly exhausted?

After receiving the ring, Jordan travels to the planet Oa where he meets the thousands of other Lanterns whose appearances range from fishy humanoids to burly trolls. Their leader, Sinestro (Mark Strong) looks almost completely human except that he has reddish purple skin, pointy ears and even pointier eyebrows. The Lanterns are currently plagued by the evil Parallax, a former Guardian of the Universe turned giant cloudy beast. He seeks to destroy Oa using the yellow power of Fear (as opposed to the green power of Will) but for reasons I have forgotten, must first devour Earth. This is where Jordan comes in.

There is another villain back on Earth named Dr. Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard wearing a spectacular receding hairline and moustache), a science professor who is given the opportunity to study the body of the alien who crashed on Earth. Unbeknownst to him (but knownst to us), he is exposed to a trace of Parallax’s yellow DNA and its evil powers soon overcome him.

Dr. Hammond is a sorry excuse for a villain. The DNA of Parallax allows him unspeakable powers but he wastes them in a pathetic fit of jealousy over Jordan’s love interest, the improbably beautiful Air Force pilot Carol Ferris (Blake Lively). Dr. Hammond is so absorbed by his crush on Ferris that he is oblivious to Parallax’s plan for world devouring. Neither he nor Jordan have much of an understanding of what is going on and neither can think of anything better to do with their cool, new powers but use them against one another in a handful of dull, insipid fight scenes.

With the exception of the ghastly Parallax, the special effects in Green Lantern have a cartoonish silliness that might have been better suited to a children’s film. Come to think of it, Green Lantern on a whole might have been better off as a kids’ movie. The story’s simplicity might have been charming in a low-stakes PG outing but when blown-up to blockbuster proportions, one can only think about how little one cares about any of the characters onscreen.

I cannot say whether Green Lantern stays true to its comic book origins or not. I have had virtually no contact with the character or the world he is a part of prior to this movie. I do know, however, that the filmmakers behind Green Lantern could have made anything. Anything at all. And this is what they chose.

- Steven Avigliano, 6/29/11