Safe House (***½)
Directed by: Daniel Espinosa
Starring: Denzel Washington, Ryan Reynolds, Vera Farmiga, Brendan
Gleeson, Sam Shepard, Robert Patrick
Seen: February 12th 2012
***½
Out of ****
I’ve been waiting for a decent action thriller for quite a while now,
and while it’s not perfect or indeed the most original of action thrillers, I think
Safe House delivers the goods in a big way. This movie is tense, it features
great car chases and fight scenes and fire fights and Denzel Washington and Ryan
Reynolds deliver two fully fleshed characters. One small problem I have is the
one of deceiving the viewer to deliver a so-called twist later on in the movie,
I don’t like it if the twist doesn’t originate out of good writing, even if it
is just in a small way as it is here. Another small problem that in no way
reduced my enjoyment of the movie: strikes and public marches around employment
in South Africa DO NOT feature crowds with a white representation of over 5%,
let alone more than 50% as in the movie.
When rogue CIA-agent Tobin Frost (Washington) gets in a too deep selling
priviledged information to the wrong buyers, he is left with no other option
than to hand himself in at the American Consulate in Cape Town. Having been on
wanted lists in CIA ranks for years, he is immediately transferred to a local
safe house, where the care-taker is the rookie agent Matt Weston (Reynolds). A field
team under Daniel Kiefer (Patrick) is dispatched from Johannesburg (the movie
references Zwartkops Airforce base as being in Johannesburg, while it is
actually in Centurion, just south of Pretoria) to interrogate Frost by their
boss at Langley, Catherine Linklater (Farmiga). The team barely settles in
before the safe house is attacked and only Weston and Frost escape alive,
resulting in a pulse-pounding car-chase through the streets of Cape Town as
Frost attempts to escape from Weston en route to the new safe house.
At Langley the pressure is on and CIA Deputy Director Harlan Whitford (Shepard)
sends Linklater and David Barlow (Gleeson), another high ranking CIA official
and friend to Weston, to South Africa to clean up the mess. Allegiances fly all
over the place and soon enough Weston is under suspicion of having turned to
Frost’s side. Everything hurtles towards a conlcusion where the fights get
brutal and the bad guys’ bosses are revealed.
At one point nearing the end I felt that this movie seems to be so
brutal and merciless that only 0.7 characters wil survive it, and what added to
this tension was that it could be anyone coming back from the brink of death
once the dust settles. I enjoyed Ryan Reynolds’ rendition of this CIA rookie and
in particular scenes where he spoke in Afrikaans, my first language, even
though you can definitely hear he has some difficulty with it (like a CIA agent
living in Cape Town for 12 months would have). Denzel Washington reminded of
his character John Creasy in the fantastic Tony Scott movie Man on Fire, a brutally
efficient killing and fighting machine. While the movie was shot in Cape Town,
this is not a Cape Town to be marketed to prospective tourists, as the majority
of scenes play out in the slums of the city. Safe House is a cracking action
thriller and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
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