Safe House
DIRECTED BY DANIEL ESPINOSA
It’s in contrast to action thrillers like Safe House that the virtues of Steven Soderbergh’s recent Haywire become particularly apparent. Both films rely on the familiar, post-Bourne scenario of the ultra-skilled operative gone rogue, but Soderbergh distills the experience to its essence, delivering a brisk, bone-crunching spectacle. With a former MMA pro in the lead role, it’s a safe bet that Haywire‘s producers won’t be mounting a Best Actress campaign this time next year, but in terms of the genere’s key elements—action and thrills—the film delivers in spades.
Safe House, which stars two-time Oscar winner Denzel Washington, effectively inverts that formula. Washington plays disgraced CIA super-spy Tobin Frost, who is apprehended in South Africa and entrusted to the supervision of a rookie field agent (Ryan Reynolds), pending repatriation. Reynolds is capable co-lead, and Washington is as watchable as ever, but Daniel Espinosa’s film otherwise suffers from poor pacing, predictable twists, and ubiquitous use of action-obscuring shaky-cam.
Still, if Haywire represents an unusually high bar against which to compare a by-the-numbers, first-quarter Hollywood flick, Safe House is generally a decent-enough distraction. Brendan Gleeson and Vera Farmiga round out a strong supporting cast, while in Cape Town, the film at least offsets its pedestrian plot with a seldom-seen setting.