Safe House | Film review

Safe House stars Denzel Washington as a rogue operative who abandoned his work as the CIA’s top expert on psychological profiling to pursue a lucrative business selling secrets. Ten years into this endeavor, Washington’s Tobin Frost is introduced in the middle of a botched South African info-smuggle. In desperation—or is it?—he seeks refuge from a chase in an American embassy, setting the stage for his most daring escape yet. But a transfer and another shootout later, Frost finds himself the prisoner of pencil-pushing, Ivy-educated colleague Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds), who doesn’t have the agility—or does he?—to pin down one of the world’s most wanted men.

Shot in a faux–Tony Scott color scheme, the slapdash action sequences have the perverse effect of slowing the movie down. The heart of the film is the evolving spy-to-spy relationship, as Weston and Frost parse a welter of motivations and MacGuffins only a screenwriter could love. Safe House has the germ of an interesting idea in its anti-corruption sentiment: If all agents eventually turn, it asks, is there a point at which treason against their agencies becomes patriotic? This troubling moral thicket is not one into which House cares to delve too deeply. The double-crosses seem audience-tested; even with an exciting finale, the movie plays it too safe.