Fridae

Safe House plays like a lesser movie from Tony Scott, known for shooting mainstream action pictures with his infamous set of shakycams, montages and quick cuts that attempt to transplant experimental film techniques into the mainstream action movie market. Scott's unique cinematic approach is generally enough to compensate the often daffy, lackluster scripts he has to work with. And like many of Scott's recent films, it stars Denzel Washington in the role of a self-righteous, thinking man's action hero.

Tobin Frost (Washington) is one of the United States' most notorious traitors, a former top CIA operative who has sold secrets to rival intelligence agencies for years. One day, after receiving a microchip from an MI6 operative in Cape Town, Frost heads for the American Consulate General in Cape Town to turn himself in, where he is escorted to a Safe House where young operative Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) is awaiting. The Safe House is attacked by armed men, and Weston and Frost find themselves on the run from their attackers, and engaged in a game of matching wits with each other.

However, soon it turns out that there is more than meets the eye as CIA official Harlan Whitford (Robert Patrick) dispatches agents Barlow (Brendan Gleeson) and Linklater (Vera Farmiga) to South Africa to bring in Frost and Weston.

The American debut of Swedish director Daniel Espinosa, who hit it big in his homeland for Snabba Cash, far unlike that of his fellow Swede Tomas Alfredson, whose Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy also opens this week, settles for sheer crowd-pleasing mediocrity and barely taking any risks. Espinosa's direction is standard for the genre, nothing more nor less, while Washington and Reynolds give their best with the very limited roles they have been given as the tough, cynical veteran agent turned traitor and the impulsive young rookie to whom he starts off as an enemy, but becomes a mentor to. The plot doesn't take on too many twists that won't be unfamiliar for those who have ploughed through enough airport reads from Robert Ludlum. And at the end of the day it's little more than a standard spy fantasy filled with the requisite number of car crashes, loud action setpieces, and clearly drawn lines in the sand between good and evil far unlike the more complex reality that Tinker engages in.

Safe House lives up to its name in terms of its predictability.