Safe House, 2012.
Directed by Daniel Espinosa.
Starring Denzel Washington, Ryan Reynolds, Vera Farmiga, Sam Shephard, Brendan Gleeson and Robert Patrick.
SYNOPSIS:
A junior CIA agent (Ryan Reynolds) gets caught up in an espionage scandal and is forced to go on the run with a high priority prisoner (Denzel Washington) after their safe house comes under attack.
For film fans out there, the trailer for Safe House would lead you to assume that Tony Scott (Man on Fire, Unstoppable, The Taking of Pelham 123, Deja Vu) has paired up with his muse Denzel Washington for yet another action film that will be ‘just okay’, and utterly forgettable. I’m here to reassure you that Safe House pleasantly surprised in almost every way possible.
One element that impressed me from the outset was that the film is set in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa. It’s not doubling for another city – it’s there in all its beauty and, in the sequences in the shanty town and tenements, its squalor. When a large majority of espionage flicks are set in New York, London, Moscow, Rio etc., it comes as a nice aesthetic relief to have a shiny new setting. I hope not to spoil it for anyone but the film almost exclusively takes place in Cape Town and the surrounding areas, which makes for a more claustrophobic thriller overall. But I digress.
Safe House surprises with a solid supporting cast that includes Vera Farmiga, Brendan Gleeson, Sam Shepard and Robert Patrick, but the film belongs to its leads – Ryan Reynolds, and especially, the wonderful two-time Academy Award winner Denzel Washington.
More often than not, Reynolds is cast to portray Van Wilder in essentially every role that he plays. It makes for utterly predictable and boring voids in most of his films, but I am delighted to say that Matt Weston was a fully formed and different character from the majority of the performances I’ve seen Reynolds in. Weston is a young, idealistic and ambitious field agent on his first assignment that is desperate to impress and get out of the boring ‘babysitting’ safe house job. Unlike the overt smart-arse bravado that occupies his other characters, Matt is shy in the face of adversity and is affected by the deadly assassins pursuing his prisoner.
His prisoner is Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington) – the poster boy for the CIA until he went rogue in 2001 to trade in agency secrets. Washington is one of the greatest actors ever to be committed to celluloid and it’s a tragedy that he doesn’t get enough leading roles that allow him to really stretch out. However, we’ll take him as the effortlessly bad-ass Frost, who echoes Alonzo Harris from Training Day, but is really a kind of older, wiser Jason Bourne. He’s simply hypnotic; his vocal cadence is rhythmic and his eyes are able to express and enunciate emotions without him changing his expression. His physical presence can be felt sitting in your seat. Similar to someone like Liam Neeson in Taken, Washington’s Frost is totally believable in the physical exchanges that he has throughout the film. Denzel is one of the coolest men on the planet and I’m glad that this film didn’t dim his powerful effect.
This is the first English language effort of Swedish director Daniel Espinosa and he’s clearly influenced by Tony Scott’s occasional jagged cutting between sequences and multiple fluid cameras that flow between the different character interactions. There’s also evidence of the post-Paul Greengrass (director of The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum) effect of rapid-fire cuts for car chase sequences. He framed the film very well, approaching each character with angles relative to each scene. The camera is rarely static and it makes for frenetic viewing. Espinosa’s biggest strength was his portrayal of violence and there isn’t any unrealistic action in Safe House, save an ever so slightly implausible car chase. The falls hurt, the shots are loud, and the hits are bone jarring and blood curdling in equal measure. Espinosa’s approach to violence is the much more effective Die Hard type instead of the ridiculous Fast Five style.
Writer David Guggenheim is also relatively new to the business and he delivers a solid script with some minor and very forgivable flaws. This kind of espionage action recycles a lot from its predecessors – or perhaps I should say stands on the shoulders of Bond, Bourne and Hunt, but that’s to be expected. The mix in Safe House is right. Save for following a well-worn path and a very ‘clean’ ending (which I personally don’t like), this is a decent effort for a relatively new writer.
Safe House will not be able to escape comparisons to the Bourne series in style or story. However, don’t be so quick to dismiss the serious and effective portrayal of violence. This is Ryan Reynolds’ best performance that I’ve seen since Van Wilder, along with the wonderful, iconic and legendary Denzel Washington getting the screen time and playing the bad-ass characters that we love to see him play.
Blake Howard is a writer/site director/podcaster at the castleco-op.com. Follow him on Twitter here:@blakeisbatman.
