Safe House

“Everybody betrays everybody.” You wouldn’t want South African killers on your heels. Set in the rarely seen streets of Cape Town, Safe House is a decent thriller with Ridley Scott-like visuals and editing like in the Bourne series. The action is decent given it’s a work of a first-time Hollywood director, but the script is only a dime-a-dozen story of a young agent physically and mentally battling the corrupt CIA system (in which he had blindly believed). I couldn’t see the sort of chemistry between the mentor and the newcomer that was supposed to be the driving force of the film. The Denzel Washington / Ethan Hawke duo in Training Day was much better in this respect. (09/02/2012)

I found it hard to feel anything towards the characters, I don’t know why Tobin Frost was so tight and why Ryan Reynolds was so unimpressive. Action fine overall, and no shortage of swines in charge. The story is more or less a classic. A little livelier story would have helped. The ending is very pleasing with a nice whistle-blower’s epilog. (24/05/2012)

It's good to see it as basically the debut of Daniel Espinosa's, an almost unknown director, at least for now. At the same time, Safe House is a film with a script that doesn’t have any higher ambitions, but within the mainstream, it’s more than solid. Fortunately, it's not just a dumb action movie, although it slightly leans towards that thematically. It's saved by the excellent cast (Reynolds, Washington) and intense, kinetic action like Jason Bourne. Espinosa certainly didn't disgrace the genre, and I wouldn't be afraid to entrust him with a bigger budget, a more interesting theme, to raise the bar a bit and let him work his magic. He knows how action and fast pace should look like. (07/07/2012)

The film was probably supposed to give the impression that an agent/prison warden is capable of self-reflection, but I lost my naivety many years ago, so my opinion hasn’t changed. Action-wise, I have no major complaints, the creators obviously made an effort to do a good job in that regard, so action scenes were handled very well (too bad the cameraman didn't let me see more of it, the saboteur). What was worse was the suspense, which was noticeably lacking given that it was clear who was going to make it through the crossfire to the finale, and also because it was extremely predictable who the main villain was. No, let me rephrase that. The sentence should have read: who was behind the main character's problems. There were so many villains that I really wouldn't have dared to guess which one was the worst. Aside from the already mentioned flaws, there were logic holes here and there, and the main message was the cliché about the Secret Service being a necessary evil. That’s all I took away from the film. / Lesson learned: You’d better not go running on South African rooftops. (08/08/2022)