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Tuesday, February 7, 2012

MOVIE REVIEW
Safe House
Spy Games In South Africa, And Beyond

Ryan Reynolds as Matt Weston and Denzel Washington as Tobin Frost in Daniel Espinosa's drama "Safe House".  Universal Pictures
    
by Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com        Follow popcornreel on Twitter FOLLOW                                           
Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Shock and awe!  It's Peckinpah!

So screams the visceral, relentless school of hard knocks that rookie CIA youngster Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) endures in Daniel Espinosa's nasty, breakneck spy drama "Safe House", which opens across the U.S. and Canada on Friday, a film that rubs your nose in its ever-rising body count, and shows that you can't even trust your own shadow.

Notorious and dangerous, Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington), an ex-CIA spy wanted by his former employers, is in a safe house in South Africa for interrogation for a file that has some highly incriminating information on it.  Soon, a group who wants him more urgently than the CIA does breaks into a supposedly hermetically sealed bunker to corral Frost.  Matt has to protect Frost, who engages in a test of wills with him, while keeping his promise to bring him in intact to Langley, Virginia.

None of this of course, will be easy, and Mr. Espinosa presents his male characters as sitting ducks with expiration dates arriving sooner than expected, even in a film that is largely two steps behind its audience on the predictability chart.  "Safe House" reveals that nothing is safe or certain, including the foundations of the house and the double lives of the men within them.  The blunt instrument of death, often displayed with impunity, is lurking around each corner.  The script by David Guggenheim is specific enough to keep all of the action and drama centered on the principals and their related satellites, though the weakest part of the film is the love story involving Matt that is supposed to round out his character.

"Safe House", which has a strong supporting cast of actors, blurs the lines, notions and degrees of bad and good, and as shot by Oliver Wood, its grainy texture represents the unstable relationship between the two.  The spy business is messy, deceptive and cruel, and the violence of such a world is succinctly illustrated.  Mr. Espinosa's film resembles a cross between Mr. Washington and Tony Scott's "Man On Fire", Mr. Scott's "Spy Game" and Antoine Fuqua and Mr. Washington's "Training Day", mixed with more than a few Peckinpah blasts of prolonged bloody violence.

Frost is amiable, wily, experienced, though there's nothing truly bad about him.  He is a man of expedience, a fugitive who has to keep on running while schooling his would be captor as to how the game is played.  Both he and Matt have been victims of a chess game where the ultimate goal isn't checkmate but body blow.  Guns are always at the ready when the thinking game is exhausted.  Mr. Washington is as magnetic as he was in "Training Day", though less nuanced.  As Frost he's a tutor not a tormentor, a man with one key lesson to teach.  Matt, a vulnerable and dogged soul portrayed by Mr. Reynolds, has to trust that the lesson plan hasn't been totally rigged.

With: Sam Shepard, Brendan Gleeson, Vera Farmiga, Liam Cunningham, Ruben Blades, Nora Arnezeder, Robert Patrick.

"Safe House" is rated R by the Motion Picture Association Of America for strong violence throughout and some language.  Parts of the film are in Afrikaans with English subtitles.  The film's running time is one hour and 56 minutes. 


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