Review of “Safe House”
A gritty game of cat and rat, Safe House has some explosive car chases and thrilling manhunts through the streets of Cape Town, but ultimately turns into a fairly predictable and linear spy thriller, with a routine tough-guy performance from Denzel Washington and a highly contemporary style.
Washington plays Tobin Frost, a maverick CIA agent who’s missing presumed fled (with vital secrets) and who’s evaded capture from his government for nearly ten years. When he surprisingly walks into a US Consulate in South Africa, he is taken to a safe house in the centre of Cape Town for debriefing and a spot of torture. The tardis-like house (ordinary on the outside, full of buttons, screens, steel and locks on the inside) is being looked after by rookie agent Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) who has had nothing to do for nearly a year other than keep the fridge stocked and learn French so he can communicate better with his Parisian girlfriend Ana (Nora Arnezeder). But when significant others – armed to the teeth with machine guns and grenades – also arrive at the house to see Mr. Frost, Weston’s boring routine turns into adrenalin-fuelled chaos. Weston’s mission is to keep both himself and Frost alive long enough for them both to be brought back to safety.
Young Swedish director Daniel Espinosa employs a Bourne aesthetic for the film, cleverly using handheld camera, crash zooms and jump-cuts to give the action an impressionistic immediacy. He handles the set pieces with great confidence and the car chases through the centre of Cape Town and man-on-man gunfights across the rooftops of shanty townships are edge-of-the seat stuff. Less successful are the CIA headquarters scenes, where Catherine Linklater (Vera Farmiga), David Barlow (Brendan Gleeson) and their boss Harlan Whitford (Sam Shepard) are vying to control the operation that has more at stake than meets the eye.
The film’s edgy style owes much to the excellent work of cinematographer Oliver Wood and editor Richard Pearson (who both worked on the Bourne films), with the picture given a final finish with a desaturated wash. Given the action-orientation of the film, Washington and Reynolds are never pushed much beyond the grimace, although early scenes of Weston with his girlfriend and then reluctantly witnessing the torture of Frost, give Reynolds the opportunity to establish his hero as a sensitive new age spy.
With some excellent music from Ramin Djawadi, this is a well made and racy action thriller, just lacking some depth of character and narrative punch.
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