Review - Safe House

The CIA gets a lot of bad press. The torture, phone taps and everything else that goes along with protective intelligence agencies. The media gets a hold of this and they get a lot of bad press it from it all. Then we have the movies - The Bourne Series, Spy Game...all of them showing the CIA’s questionable methods.

Now we Safe House, a film that not only shows just how amazing it could be to work for the CIA but also how everyone within the CIA is a moral compass, that play by the rules...Ok, now that I think this review is not being monitored I'll continue...

Safe House actually follows along the lines of the Bourne series and a few others before it, pointing out the CIA’s corruption and manipulation.

The plot breakdown is - Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) is a CIA rookie who is manning a safe house in Cape Town, South Africa, when Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington) the CIA's most wanted rogue agent gives himself up to the US consulate and is taken to the safe house. During Frost's interrogation, the safe house is attacked by a group that want what Frost has. Weston and Frost escape and must stay out of the group’s sight until they can get to another safe house.

Reynolds and Washington don’t have a whole lot to work with in terms of dialogue but both do some decent work. Each conveying their own desperation in what they feel is necessary to do. Apart from the two main leads, no one else has a lot to do. Basically everyone else is a cardboard cut out, the assassins (straight from the assassins are us handbook), the bickering CIA bosses, Weston’s French hottie, these characters are all by the book and that is no slight on the film because they fit in well but it is just not very inventive.

Plenty of decent action scenes though, a heap of gun fire and car chases but the best scenes where the hand to hand combat scenes, especially the fight at the climax of the film. Not the most original or inventive film but still a decent film to sit in the cinema and forget about the world for 2 hours.