Safe House (2012)

Denzel Washington has one of the most magnetic presences of any actor working today. Place him in any scene, and suddenly all the other actors begin to revolve around him. In the new film Safe House, he spends much of the first act simply sitting in a chair, but even then he has the power to completely control every frame. Yet Washington’s last few films—the Tony Scott thrillers Pelham 123 and Unstoppable along with The Book of Eli—have been made of pretty lightweight material. They aren’t bad, necessarily, but the subtext to every scene seems to be that Washington is probably better than all this. Safe House does nothing to break that formula, and that is evident from the moment we first see his character walking down the street. He plays a man who is always one step ahead of everyone else, and putting Washington in so pedestrian a film is an equally unfair fight.

The real protagonist of Safe House is Matt Weston, a young CIA agent played by Ryan Reynolds. Much to his chagrin, he has spent a year as the guardian of a safe house in Cape Town, South Africa. His days are spent alone in an empty complex throwing balls against the wall until he possibly gets reassigned elsewhere. Things heat up when the CIA brings in Tobin Frost (Washington), an ex-agent who has gone rogue. The safe house is then breached during interrogation, which means Weston must now look after Frost by himself out in the open. He spends the rest of the film juggling Frost, his superiors in Langley, and the mysterious men with guns who are on their tail.

The overall lameness of Safe House is no fault of the performers, most of whom do perfectly fine work here. Washington is obviously great in a role that was built for him; a guy who is in complete control even when a gun is in his face. Based on what we’ve seen in previous film roles, a guy like Ryan Reynolds would seem to be no match for Washington, but I was actually quite impressed by Reynolds in this film. His character is mostly a babe in the woods, and the transition into a slightly more competent and violent presence seemed more earned that I might have expected. He never becomes Jason Bourne, thankfully, and he hits the emotional beats rather convincingly. Those who go see this movie will likely do it because of Washington, but I hope they leave reasonably impressed by what Reynolds does. He just needs to get himself in some better movies.

Everything else is just—and I’m going to use the academic term—a whole lot of “bleh.” Great supporting actors like Vera Farmiga and Brendan Gleeson are both forced into roles that I could probably play in my sleep, so that gives you an idea of how much their talents are wasted. (Many of their scenes are in a Langley situation room, where the lackeys around them spew out “important” exposition about Reynolds and Washington.) The script by David Guggenheim amounts to nothing more than a string of setpieces that never cohere into an exciting whole. There was never any doubt in my mind where the movie was going, where Weston’s allegiances would lie at film’s end, and who the CIA mole was once the whole idea of one was introduced. When a potential twist like that is teased in the first act, it’s up to the film to give us several possible candidates so that we’re never two hours ahead of the plot. (Think Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: I never had any idea what was going on, and that’s a good thing.) Once the plot of Safe House kicked into motion, I had the rest of the film mapped out in my head within seconds.

One of the least surprising facts about Safe House is that its cinematographer is Oliver Wood, who shot all three of the Bourne films. (And the Freaky Friday remake!) There are action sequences in this film that clearly ape Paul Greengrass’ kinetic style, and director Daniel Espinosa never quite grabs the reins and makes the movie his own.  From start to finish, Safe House has the feeling of a standard issue faux-gritty Hollywood thriller, and the material never transcends that. This is a film that stars no less than four good-to-great actors, and it devotes much of its running time to chaotic chase sequences through the streets of Cape Town. Yet it pulls off the not inconsiderable feat of being painfully, painfully boring.

Grade: C-