‘Safe House” may strike you as a brilliant movie, provided you’ve seen fewer than, say, 10 spy thrillers. I’ve seen more than 10 spy thrillers.
As with “Three Days of the Condor,” we meet a handsome young spy (actor’s initials: R.R.) from the lowest rung on the CIA ladder. In this case, it’s Ryan Reynolds, and his job is housesitter for an empty apartment in Cape Town, South Africa. Matt Weston (Reynolds) yearns to do cool spy stuff, but instead all he’s asked is to be ready with coffee and snacks in case any international supervillains need to be brought there and waterboarded, which no one ever does. Until!
Denzel Washington is Tobin Frost, who yields a classic example of how weak screenwriters establish character. For about 20 minutes, everyone goes around saying, “Tobin Frost? Really? You’ve got Tobin Frost? Hey, you’re Tobin Frost!” When they waterboard him, he jeers, telling them their towels are the wrong thread count or something.
I was tempted to go out to play a few games of Sudoku as I waited for all the background figures to clear out (Condor: “Everybody’s dead!” Weston: “They’re all dead!”) and the movie to settle into the tale of a rookie on the run. Weston regularly calls Langley (as Robert Redford did in “Condor”) to get a combination of instruction and misdirection that seems equally likely to get him killed or save his life. Irrelevant intel keeps popping up onscreen (“1:53 p.m., Thursday.” Who cares?) and there’s a girl, though not an interesting one. She’s French, she likes sex and that’s about all we get.
Even before the scene in which good guy straddles villain and barks, “Who do you work for?” the movie succeeds extravagantly in its main goal, which is to be as average as possible. At CIA HQ, where lots of zippy graphics get punched up on screens, we meet Matt’s handler (Brendan Gleeson), another desk officer (Vera Farmiga) and the boss (Sam Shepard). He’s one of those squared-away leaders whose chief skill is yelling that other people should do their jobs. “I want everything you’ve got on Tobin Frost!” he o
rders. Just once, I’d like to see a movie spy chief watch in dismay as 40,000 pages of documents get forklifted onto his desk. “Er, not everything, guys . . . ”
These officers tell us (and, in a massive open-plan office, anyone at the CIA who cares to listen — isn’t this joint supposed to kinda value secrecy?) that Frost is a treasonous spy who “went off the reservation” and is pretty much the most-wanted fugitive in the galaxy, though Washington plays him in quiet-dignity mode, so we know he’s actually going to turn out to be a misunderstood hero.
The main attraction of the movie is watching Washington school Reynolds — not in spycraft but in acting. Reynolds is sweaty and frantic. Washington learned long ago that the trick is not to act, but to be. He rarely raises his voice above a whisper as the untested Matt (with his fancy Yale economics degree) drives around dodging bullets to find another safe house in which to stash him. Every 10 minutes, little-known director Daniel Espinosa throws in rattly “Bourne Identity” fight scenes in which whoever is adjacent to Washington gets shot in the face, and cars going 50 mph crash without seriously injuring anyone inside. Reynolds incurs the requisite small cut on the left cheek that movie tough guys seem to be born with.
The great thing about writing a spy movie is you can make up your own slang (as John le Carré so cleverly did). The CIA is not going to hold a press conference to correct you. Instead, screenwriter David Guggenheim picks out every weed in the dialogue garden and presents them as a bouquet: “I want eyes on this,” “Stay off the grid,” “You’re good to go,” “We are completely buttoned up.”
Matt, the alleged young genius (remember — he went to Yale!) takes Frost to a soccer game with about 80,000 people. Because when you’re with the most-wanted man in a town crawling with assassins, why not parade him around? Get him up on the Jumbotron, maybe. The climax of the movie (also familiar from “Condor”) involves a senior figure doing something even stupider than this.
Thanks to Washington’s ease (taking pity on Matt, Frost tells him, in one of the few sharp lines, “I only hit professionals”) and sufficient noisy gunplay and chases to at least earn the movie the label of “action-y,” you will want to stick around and learn the identity of the mole who set everything in motion, not that this info makes much difference. The ending, idiotic as it is, is also worth seeing, mainly because the subtext reveals so much about Hollywood’s upside-down thinking. Yes, this is a community that actually considers Julian Assange a hero.