Safe House

I don’t know what I was hoping for with Safe House but I certainly wasn’t expecting so little. With films like Taken setting the bar very low these days for the action genre it seems that a whole parade of films are following in its ridiculous wake and Safe House is but one of these movies. Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) is a CIA Safe House Operative in Cape Town. His role involves waiting around a secure house in case the CIA ever needs to move a criminal, terrorist etc. Twelve months into the posting Matt’s first house guest arrives in the shape of Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington) a highly skilled rogue CIA Agent who is being chased by a menagerie of vaguely foreign looking killers. Frost repeatedly ditches Weston but he never stops hunting the rogue agent down and more nonsense I’m bored.

Safe House was more full of holes than holy water from the holy land and had the most obvious twist since Rock ‘n’ Roll. It is such a stupid movie that I can barely bring myself to discuss it. It is never exciting or interesting and beside solid but unspectacular central performances there is literally nothing of merit in the entire 110 minutes.

The movie is shot using the sort of oppressive strip lighting and grainy images that were popular about fifteen years ago. It reminded me of the likes of Seven or Swordfish in the way it was shot but is a poor imitation of both. There was an almost fluorescent or even ultra violet look to the lighting and it made the film look much older than it is. The Director Daniel Espinosa also seems to think that you can create a great action movie simply by wobbling the camera around a lot. It is a poor Bourne rip-off and is really off-putting. There is a much hyped car chase set piece which not once increased my pulse or raised a smile from my despondent face and the chemistry between the leads was nonexistent. Denzel Washington has a sort of charming menace to him and Ryan Reynolds does his best but isn’t suited to the action role. Both actors are playing well under the rim here.

The plot is dull and predictable and full of so many holes that I was amazed they weren’t picked up in the script edit or somewhere along the assembly line. It was just hole after mind numbing hole. For a start Reynolds operates the Safe House alone so if he needs the bathroom or is on his day off then there will be no one to take in a visitor. When the Safe House is attacked the bigwigs in Langley state that there is no one in the region who can help and they’d need to ship someone in from Europe or Asia. So, the CIA has NOT ONE operative in the whole of Africa? Really? Later the central characters visit a second Safe House in the South African Bush. Well that’s at least one operative isn’t it? Duh… There is a major sequence that takes place in and around a football stadium which was written as an obvious nod to the 2010 World Cup. This section really pissed me off! Despite the match being in full swing and the stadium obviously full, there are thousands of people milling about outside and around the food and drinks stalls. What the hell are they doing? There are even people walking away from the stadium. It makes no sense.

You’d hope that the stupidity ends there but there is more. In a bit of painful exposition early on it is stated that Tobin Frost joined the CIA in 1984 was posted in Libya from 1985-88 and Jordan from 88-90 but later it was also stated that he worked in Hamburg in the late 1980s. It’s so inconsistent. Matt finds time to call his girlfriend and asks her to leave the country which so obligingly does. Unless she walks around with her passport in her pocket though she’d have had trouble when she got to the airport. Despite all of the above, the most annoying part of the whole movie is the twist which was so obvious and well signposted it was like trying to spot New York City on a map of New York City. As soon as a character opened their mouth I said to my girlfriend (who ended up falling asleep) that they were the bad guy. Just to round things off the film manages to end on in Paris, moments after the infuriating ‘Paris, France’ caption is shown with a picture of the fucking Eiffel Tower just in case idiots think it might be the other Eiffel Tower or Paris, Texas or something. For fuck’s sake.

Safe House is a film which has nothing going for it. The actors provide little but their names, the plot is predictable and boring as hell and the twist is pathetic. The plot holes are frequent and infuriating and I really recommend that people avoid, avoid, avoid.  

2/10 

   GFR Fell Asleep   

Titbits

• Denzel Washington was actually water-boarded for the torture scenes but only for a few seconds per take.
• The film was originally set in Rio but was moved to Cape Town due to security concerns.
• There is a Safe House 2 in development. This will also be rubbish.