MOVIE REVIEW: 'Safe House'

Movie review in the Friday, Feb. 10 Oregonian....

 

It's been a while since I watched a movie that felt as nakedly reverse-engineered as "Safe House." The film's a passable B-grade spy-flick divertissement -- but its script, look, editing, music, action choreography, grim tone, and cynical view of the bureaucrats who run the espionage game seem so blatantly lifted (intentionally or not) from the last two "Bourne" movies, you wonder if they had DVDs on set for reference.

(Fun, no-doubt-totally-coincidental facts: Universal Pictures produced both "Safe House" and the "Bourne" series -- which recently lost its star Matt Damon and will try to continue with Jeremy Renner this August. Also, "Safe House" employs "Bourne" series cinematographer Oliver Wood.)

Anyway. There's one major deviation in "Safe House" from the "Bourne" template: The filmmakers team the rogue-superspy character up with someone who's hunting him. That someone is Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds), a bored CIA "housekeeper" who's manned a South African "safe house" for a year and desperately wants a transfer to Paris so he can follow his girlfriend (Nora Arnezeder). The Agency disrupts his boredom by bringing in notorious ex-agent Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington) -- who went "off the reservation" years ago and now carries a damning data chip somewhere on his person.

Just as Tobin's interrogators are about to go all Jack Bauer on him, a mysterious strike team raids the safe house, sending Weston and Frost on the lam. Loyalties are tested, motives are questioned, Frost gets inside Weston's head, people really regret becoming spies, &tc. There is a remarkable amount of chasing, all of it filmed in shaky-cam -- intercut with the scenes in which surly CIA administrators (Vera Farmiga, Brendan Gleeson, Sam Shepard) grouse in a situation room full of screens and say everything short of "Let's get to work, people!"

There are several things to enjoy here. The use of motel service-industry code words by the safe-house staff is dryly funny. I like how the phrase "We'll take it from here" gets twisted into a threat. Denzel holds down the fort about as well as you'd expect, and has a lot of fun staying perfectly calm and still and maybe even a little sad while everyone violently flips out around him. Reynolds avoids his usual wisecracking routine and gives a grim, conflicted performance as a guy who really wants to prove himself. And director Daniel Espinosa makes good use of the South African locations -- particularly during a brutal chase through (and above) the patchwork slums of the Langa township.

That said, there's a hard-to-pin-down finesse that's required to keep hyper-edited shakycam action filmmaking from lending a movie a feeling of dull, vaguely confusing sameness -- to keep it from feeling like someone is shaking something in front of your face for two hours, basically -- and I'm not sure "Safe House" pulls that off. (A good example of that finesse is the third "Bourne" flick; a bad example is the second.)

I was invested in the Frost/Weston relationship by the end -- though the amount of time it takes before Matt asks Tobin "What are you carrying that's so important?" is frankly ridiculous. But there's a chase-driven stretch in the middle where the movie takes on a generic, shallow freneticism that undermines that character drama -- a sort of action oatmeal whose chief ingredient seems to be shots of our heroes and/or anonymous thugs run-walking through crowds and hallways. Putting it another way: During this stretch, one character reluctantly shoots a policeman in self-defense and it barely registers emotionally amid the busy-ness.
____
   
(115 min., rated R, multiple locations) Grade: C-plus

'Safe House' (The Oregonian, Friday, Feb. 10, 2012)

Comments

[Paul Chadwick]

I'll be glad when shakycam starts to fall out of favor.

It's like bacon. A little adds savor. But I seldom want twelve strips of bacon at a time.

[ralph lauren chaussures]

Ein wenig fügt genießen. Aber ich selten wollen zwölf Speckstreifen in einer Zeit.