Film Review: Safe House 2012

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SOME SPOILERS

Settled down to watch Safe House the other night with Ishbel, well Denzel Washington, it has to be good, right!

Funnily enough while watching it I couldn't help thinking of Mr Snowden, he,  the tittle tattle who wants to claim asylum in any country that will give it to him.... for fear that he falls back into the hands of his countrymen over his revelations about PRISM

So, our Denzel is playing the role of Tobin Croft, I don't know what it is about that name but I really liked it, even if he was playing a chap of dubious character.  Just say it, out loud, Tobin Croft! It has something to it that just draws you in..... or it could just be Denzel's charisma although I was glad when he cut back on the mini afro and got rid of the beard.

Tobin Croft is an ex- CIA NOC agent (none of us had heard that term before the first reboot of Mission Impossible with Mr Cruise, now it makes regular appearances) who has gone rogue.

He meets with an ex MI6 agent, Alec Wade played by Liam Cunningham ( I could listen to that man read the telephone directory, what a wonderful voice he has) in South Africa who gives him some secret information that he, Frost,  is going to make public, about shady Company ops, but they are being tracked.

After recieving the information he and Wade escape the handover place in a car when Wade is quickly despatched by a sniper. He manages to escape to the US Consular building as the team hunting him close down all the avenues of escape.

While all of that has been going on we have been introduced to the 'HouseKeeper' a person who looks after and maintains a safe house for the Company and is generally bored out of his skull, so you'd think this was a job for old tired agents, but the two safe houses we get to see in this movie are 'kept' by one fit and aggressive guys, the first of which is, and the other lead character, Matt Weston played by the Green lantern aka Ryan Reynolds. He has been stuck in this dead end boring role for over a year even although we learn later on in the movie that he was in the top percentile of agents to come out of 'The Farm'! So a bit of incongruity in the writing here I suspect.....

From then on in it is a chase film with the molten terminator Robert Patrick making a cameo, I guess, as he was killed off pretty quickly and he is putting on the beef a bit as he gets older with his team and he being killed off as the original hunt team attack the safe house to get their hands on Croft and the information he has.

The action is interspaced with scenes back in Langley who are clearly keen to get their hands back on Croft and the machinations going on back there.  Brendan Gleeson, another fine actor from Ireland like Cunningham is one of the head honcho's back there and I do like him in almost everything I have seen him in, including a couple of wee small independent Irish movies, but I Just couldn't take to him in this.

Back to South Africa and Frost is getting into Weston's head as they try to stay alive and reach a second safe house, but how are the Hunters being so successful in tracking them........

At the end of the day it was a passable action movie but not worthy of Washington, Cunningham and Gleason and Reynolds, well he is OK in the wee movies he does and I am a sucker for Superheroes but he is not in the same class as the aforementioned threesome.

My rating: Good and worth a watch but not great
Ishbel's rating; Bloody Good ( I am beginning to worry our roles are being reversed after all these years)