Safe House

★★★★★
SAFE HOUSE
UNIVERSAL
RELEASED 24 February 2012

Denzel Washington IS Tobin Frost, a man who’s never going to have his name forgotten. Ryan Reynolds IS, er, Matt Weston. It’s quite clear who’s the star of this movie. Frost has intel on corrupt agents in the CIA and the MI6, and he’s been missing from the CIA for the last nine years. He’s the best. He re-wrote the rule book on something or other. The CIA are frightened of him, frightened of him in a Hannibal Lecter way. His name is up there with Voldemort. They want to lock him up and retreive the data. So they put him in a ‘Safe House’… with Ryan Reynolds. Yes, ‘himbo’ Ryan Reynolds. In a shock plot twist, Frost escapes from the ‘safe house’ (surprisingly quickly) and Weston chases him, determined to bring him in. Cue two men spending two hours rolling around on the floor getting bloody and firing very loud guns.

‘Safe House’ felt like a high-contrast retread of the ‘Bourne’ films, stealing action sequences (brutal car chase, rooftop jumping, filming in a public place, spy-on-spy hand-to-hand combat to the death) as well as the CIA following events in South Africa through hundreds of flatscreen monitors in their sexy Langley command centre, with Vera Faminga stepping in for Joan Allen and Brendan Gleeson replacing David Strathairn. Universal released the ‘Bourne’ movies, so I guess, business-speaking, they’re within their rights to knock out a ‘Bourne’ rip-off movie in the years between (although the Matt Damon-free ‘The Bourne Legacy’ plays this summer). All the writer (David Guggenheim) has added is two main characters on the run as opposed to one. Genius. The guy’s script, which he wrote in three months, sparked a Hollywood bidding war, apparently. Go figure.

Unlike the ‘Bourne’ movies, the characters are paper-thin and charmless, with Guggenheim seeming to think investing Denzel Washington’s character with a love of red wine somehow makes him poetic (when he isn’t snapping people’s necks). ‘Pinotage is a good grape’. Come on Denzel, ‘Safe House’ is seriously beneath your awesome talents. On the other hand, it’s probably the best thing Ryan Reynolds has done for a few years! Maybe Big D was helping out the good-looking Canuck. Beats getting laughed at wearing green lycra.

TWO OUT OF FIVE