Not so Safe House

In Safe House Ryan Reynolds reprises his role as Green Lantern to battle the nefarious Mr. Frost, played by Denzel Washington, whose superpowers include the ability to beat people up really badly and inject data capsules into his body where nobody will find them. Unfortunately, Hal Jordan has somehow managed to lose his ring and gets beat up a lot and stabbed with broken glass. And his driver's license has probably been revoked because he wrecks a lot of cars.

Okay, so Reynolds actually takes on the role of Matt Weston, a CIA "housekeeper," someone whose job is to watch over a safe house for field operatives and to maintain the safety of any "house guests" who arrive for a little enhanced interrogation. It seems like a pretty nice gig, really. You just sit around in a highly secure place with all kinds of doors with security keypads and a nice fridge stocked with fruits, soft drinks, plasma and medicines. Yeah, you know, just like the stuff you have in your fridge right now. I guess the whole idea of showing that scene of the refrigerator contents was to let you know what kind of apartment this is, but it was kind of a moot point, given that, you know, the title of the movie sort of gives it away.

The only problem with landing a nice job like this where you get paid lots of money to sit around bouncing a tennis ball off the wall and lying to your girlfriend about working at a clinic is that inevitably Hollywood will come along and want to shoot the place up.

So when Tobin Frost arrives, poor Hal, I mean Matt, is forced to do some real tough-guy stuff like hijack a car, drive it really, really fast, get shot at and beat up and actually shoot people himself.

Reynolds is actually pretty good as the in-over-his-head Weston. He is convincing as the idealistic agent whose worldview is flipped on its side by the jaded traitor Frost. We learn early in the film that Frost is a bad dude--in multiple senses of the term. But you can't help feeling he's not all rotten to the core, and the idea that he and Weston will become allies at some point is inescapable. Because the focus of the film is on Frost and Weston, the other characters are more placeholders than anything else, with Brendan Gleeson playing Weston's boss, Vera Farmiga as the agent in charge of the operation to secure and interrogate Frost, and Sam Shephard as CIA Director Harlan Whitford. Their jobs are just to act as Hollywood expects us to believe CIA personnel behave, which is both bad and good.

The movie opens with a glimpse of Weston's life as a housekeeper. He has a girlfriend, played by Nora Arnezeder, to whom he must lie about what he's really doing. The film makes Weston's job seem insufferably boring. He's alone in a place that looks like a well-stocked bomb shelter. He seems to spend most of his time listening to music and bouncing that ball off the wall.

And then the phone rings and his life takes a drastic turn. Frost, fleeing a group of armed men hellbent on recovering the data he's just received from a contact, has walked into an embassy and got himself nabbed by the CIA to be dragged to Weston's safe house. It seems that Frost is a bad guy who sells classified information to anybody with a suitable amount of cash. What's on the data capsule he carries that warrants constant pursuit from armed men who manage to find him wherever he goes? Well, that's the big mystery in the film.

In spite of the presence of well-armed and well-trained military men, the safe house is invaded, turned upside down and all of the military personnel killed. Weston is forced to flee with Frost in tow because it's his duty to take care of his guests. "In brightest day, in blackest night ..."

We saw this coming, of course. So, too, could we predict Frost's escape and Weston's determination to get him back. The first idea we get that maybe Frost isn't all bad comes when he has the opportunity to kill Weston but does not, telling him, "I only kill professionals." At first this appears to be a taunt, an insult to the bungling, amateurish Weston, who seems in over his head and out of his element. Jason Bourne he is not. He's the guy that sits in a safe house bouncing a tennis ball off the wall. And wondering where he lost that ring. It is revealed later, however, that the taunt is more a kind of code Frost follows and instructs Weston to also follow.

Everything sorts itself out rather predictably, but the action is fast paced and the tension is thick. You'd have to be pretty dense not to know who the real bad guy is. Weston emerges as a sympathetic character, but you can't help admiring Frost's confidence and presence. That may be Washington's strength as an actor: He has a real screen presence and does the cocky, badass role very well. He nonchalantly shoots bad guys like tossing a wad of paper into a waste basket.

Many will harp on the movie's predictability, but it's not really not the point to deliver up surprising plot twists. The focus is on the characters of Weston and Frost and how their relationship evolves throughout the film. It also challenges our perceptions of what it means to be a "bad" person in the world of lies and subterfuge. The characters and situations here are light years from the old westerns in which the bad guys wore the black hats. Even then things were never so clear cut, but the waters are even muddier now.

The film ends in different kinds of triumph for both Weston and Frost. Weston learns that his idealism has been built on a sham, that his purpose served a cause that didn't really exist. His path in life has been forever altered by his experience. Frost manages to regain his humanity and in the process finds redemption. Thought it would be easy to think that Weston will follow Frost's path, the evidence suggests otherwise. It is clear that Weston is not frost and that he will in fact do as Frost instructed and be a better person than he.

As a thriller Safe House comes up a bit short for its predictability, but as a story examining the inevitable collision of two men seemingly on different sides of the spy game, it delivers an engaging character study that's worth watching.