To take a step back for a brief moment, mid-budget movies like Safe House used to pop up at cinemas all the time over ten years ago, make roughly twice, or three time it’s budget back worldwide and then disappear into relative obscurity once it eventually sprang up on DVD and Blu Ray shelves. It says a lot for the state of moviemaking now that such star studded safe bets usually end up being titles selected to go straight to streaming which I suppose in many ways is a blessing and a curse.
Still, thanks to a lot of Safe House being repurposed from elsewhere, I suppose the operative word of the title is “safe”, especially considering that stars Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds could do a lot of this plot in their sleep. But while we get spy-laced cat and mouse stuff, crashing cars and plenty of instances of Washington schooling virtually everyone around him with that natural seniority he’s gifted with, is Safe House just too safe to grip accordingly?
Junior CIA officer Matt Weston’s job is to maintain a local CIA safe house located in Cape Town, South Africa in case it’s needed for an operation or to stash someone away in, and while he attends to his hum-drum duties with professional care, he still hankers for more meaningful assignments to prove his mettle. But while he pesters his boss, mentor David Barlow, about being moved to a post in Paris, Weston’s about to have a sizable reality check when he get reports that he’s about to get a visit from something of a legendary houseguest.
Tobin Frost once was a CIA NOC operative who has long since become an international criminal who has a habit of selling stolen or bought secrets to the highest bidder, but he manages to pop up on the CIA’s radar after a meeting with a rogue MI6 officer turns into a bloodbath when a team of trigger happy mercs show up. With no option but to surrender to the American consulate, Frost is then escorted to Weston’s Safe House and is tortured by a strike team in order to find out what has lured him out from hiding, but as Weston is stunned by the whole affair, matters get exponentially worse when those dedicated mercs show up and lay waste to the place.
Weston may have always yearned for a more action-heavy role within the CIA, but in one night he’s gone from babysitting an empty safe house to trying to escort a famously dangerous criminal through a South African city with mercenaries hot on their trail and if they don’t succeed in eliminating him, Frost might do it for them if our hero let’s his guard down at the wrong moment. But as the two play mental chess games and Weston tries to keep his prisoner out of his head, there’s the question of the information that Frost has that kicked all of this off in the first place. What evidence does Frost have that could possibly kick off such carnage and how can Weston use it to keep his fat out of the fire?
While a lot of spy thrillers tend to deploy a lot of shadowy tactics to keep you off balance and unaware of what could possibly occur next, Safe House ends up being something of an overly familiar beast. Utilising plenty of aspects from other movies that you’ve seen before, it seems that the people behind this dark and moody flick wanted their audience to be weirdly as convertible as possible as it cherry picks its various aspects for maximum effect. For example, if it wasn’t for the fact that Tony Scott had tragically passed later that year, you’d swear that this movie could have been one of his, even if Daniel Espinosa’s vision doesn’t include anywhere near enough panicked editing. Not only does the presence of a laid back Denzel Washington (whose hair weirdly evokes his He Got Game days) harken to Scott’s back catalogue, but the fact that he has a tempestuous, conplex relationship with a younger, greener character means that Washington can also do that twisted, malevolent mentor stuff from Training Day, only at a far more restrained level.
Elsewhere, we also find Ryan Reynolds barely a year out from his Green Lantern debacle and four years away from finally getting Deadpool right, playing the younger, vulnerable agent who has to somehow corral a legendary criminal that’s smarter and sneaker than he can ever hope to be. As a result, Reynolds refreshingly steps down from his post as Earl of Quippington and offers up a more sensitive character undergoing a physical and moral trial by fire reminiscent of the one he went through in the sassy ensemble flick, Smokin’ Aces. From here, both Reynolds and Washington slip into the expected roles with the latter going through his usual repertoire of acting tics from top to bottom as he effortlessly switches from ironic mentor to backstabbing pseudo-villain and back again. All Reynolds has to do in return is what every younger actor does in the same predicament: let the master lead and try to keep up.
While it’s neat that the on-screen dynamic mirrors the off-screen one, like I mentioned before, it isn’t anything that we haven’t already witnessed (and better, too), but the cast is more than experienced enough to make this stuff fly. We have the absurdly dependable forms of Brendon Gleeson and Vera Farmiga on hand to basically fill out the kind of roles Brian Cox and Joan Allen played in the Bourne movies, Game Of Thones’ Liam Cunningham appears as a MI6 spook, Robert Patrick pops up as a heavy handed CIA agent and we even get one-time Robocop Joel Kinnaman, Sam Shepard and Ruben Blades at no extra cost to make the supporting cast a who’s who of familiar faces. All of the above manage to make the subsequent events that their characters are trapped in flow tremendously smoothly and director Espinosa gives the night time streets of Cape Town a shadowy.menace and also proves to be enjoyable bloodthirsty when it comes to the mortality of a lot of these known actors which helps create the illusion of Safe House being fiercely unpredictable.
However, a closer look behind the flashy production values reveal that for all of Frost’s double dealings and relentless head games, Safe House proves to be quite a standard serving of spy shenanigans that uses that muscular cast to keep you gripped. There’s no conceivable way you could make a truly unwatchable film with such a cast attached, but the fact that the film refuses to stay with you not long after it ends proves that for all of its enjoyable aspects, this safe house is also an oddly empty one.
The cast tirelessly carry a generic plot as Espinosa capably handles the car chases, gun fights, brawls and endless monologuing by Denzel. However, while staring into Reynolds’ constantly perplexed face manages to sell the threat, the overwhelming sense of “been there, done that” proves to be much more of a palpable threat then any of Washington’s machinations could ever be.
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