Film review: Safe House

By SIOBHAN SYNNOT
Published on Tuesday 21 February 2012 00:00

INCREASINGLY, playing opposite Denzel Washington seems to be the equivalent of a Hollywood work experience scheme. Ethan Hawke got a boost from Training Day, in Unstoppable it was Chris Pine.

Now it’s the turn of Ryan Reynolds (right), a button-eyed thirtysomething who can run like Matt Damon but doesn’t yet generate his box office heat, and certainly not after Green Lantern.

Reynolds plays “housekeeper” Matt Weston, whose job is to take care of a safe house in Johannesburg, where the CIA can conduct black ops.

His first customer is Tobin Frost (Washington) whose very name causes veteran agents to exchange gravely meaningful looks. A former agent himself, he’s wanted on four continents for spying when he walks into the hands of the CIA in South Africa. But director Daniel Espinosa’s still not sure that we’ve got the point, so while he waits to be interrogated, Washington adopts the unruffled manner of a man awaiting a job interview. Someone else calls Tobin “the black Dorian Gray” and it has to be said that at 57 he really does look young and fit, even when waterboarded by a tag team of American intelligence agents. But for heaven’s sake, we get it already: Denzel Washington is a dude.

There’s a lot that’s familiar in Safe House: the chases, the fist fights, and sudden attack on the safe house that leaves only Weston and Frost alive and forces them to go on the run together.

If you are a fan of Washington in Tony Scott films like Man On Fire and Unstoppable, Espinosa’s frenzied editing style, saturated colours, grainy film stock and potboiling intrigue will feel like comfort food, although there’s even less to it than meets the eye.

There is a vague attempt to discuss systematised government corruption, but you can tell the film’s heart doesn’t lie there. This is a movie about guns and guys; a shootout at a World Cup match is nicely done, and there’s a cartload of good character actors in the mix, including Liam Cunningham’s flinty man from MI6, Brendan Gleeson as Reynold’s case officer, Ruben Blades as a document forger and Sam Shepard as an agency bigwig.

And it helps that Denzel and his apprentice Reynolds have terrific chemistry – to the point that you get irritated when the film keeps cutting back to Reynolds’ low-wattage romance with a French medical student.

• Safe House (15)

Director: Daniel Espinosa

Running time: 115 minutes

Rating: ***

•On general release from Friday

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