Safe House

Safe House, from relative unknown director Daniel Espinosa, desperately wants to be a Bourne-style spy-thriller. It has the visuals, certainly, having cleverly pinched Bourne's cinematographer, and the exotic location (Cape Town in this instance). However, it lacks Bourne's smarts and cohesiveness.

Tobin Frost (Denzel Wahington) is a rogue CIA-agent and expert in psychological warfare/interrogation, etc... In order to escape people who are after him, he turns himself in to the US consulate and soon finds himself being interrogated in a safe house run by bored but ambitious operative Ryan Reynolds. Within minutes the safe house is hit and the pair are on the run across the city and surrounding countryside to evade the bad guys, the CIA and each other.

The story-line from there on in is all rather predictable - you can see who the bad guy at Langley is a mile away. The action holds up fairly well though and makes for an entertaining watch. Washington is on cruise-control, but then again Denzel on cruise control is more watchable than many actors on full throttle. The problem is that the character never feels fully developed. If you make your central character an expert on psychologically manipulating others then you need to expect that their every move will be scrutinized. Frost doesn't bear up to the scrutiny - there is one point where he apparrently clumsily gives a massive clue as to where Reynolds might be able to find him later, perhaps suggesting that maybe he wants to be caught and that there's more going on here than the obvious motivations, but these hints are never developed and the character ends up neither one thing nor another.

Washington does pull a decent performance from Reynolds, who is a frustrating actor who occasionally shows glimpses that he's capable of more (Buried, The Nines) but too often coasts through poor material on the strength of charm alone. Elsewhere a strong supporting cast is essentially wasted, especially true in the case of Vera Farmiga underused in a role very similar to her one in Source Code.

Overrall - 6/10 Entertaining action flick that could and should have had more to offer.