His only choice to survive is to head into the American embassy, where he is immediately arrested and taken to Cape Town’s secret CIA safe house for protection, to be held there momentarily before being returned to U.S. He’s in South Africa to make a big score when all hell breaks loose.

government operative who jumped ship 10 years before and began selling secrets to the highest bidder. Reynolds, meanwhile, makes this one of those periodic performances that reminds us he's capable of being an excellent actor if only he'd quit making such awful role choices.Denzel Washington is Tobin Frost, the legendary U.S. He's done the wise mentor to the hot-headed but ambitious youth thing before, but Washington's magnetic intensity and unassailably cool air have always set him apart from most other action stars, and he's as impossible to dislike here as ever. Washington and Reynolds are excellent together, in much the same vein as Washington and Ethan Hawke in Training Day or Washington and Chris Pine in Unstoppable (the latter another Scott-Washington picture). Inexperienced field agent Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) prepares to fend off an attack on his CIA safe house in Cape Town, South Africa.Įspinosa is perfectly capable, and the action packs plenty of excitement, even if the direction lacks the visual innovation that might provide unexpected jolts. He and Frost escape and head out on the lam together.

Weston, acting as audience proxy, is appropriately horrified at the torture he's witnessing, but it's cut short when the safe house turns out to be not so safe. He's so cool under pressure (Frosty, get it?) that he lectures the team on the insufficient thread count of the towels they're about to use to waterboard him. The opportunity to prove his mettle arrives with the extraction team and their fugitive, who has been brought here for some 'enhanced interrogation.' The CIA pulls him out of the consulate, taking him for questioning to a safe house watched over by Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds), a young field agent paying his dues in this dull assignment and hoping for bigger and better things. Espinosa puts his skills on display in a lengthy opening action sequence in which he is pursued around Cape Town, South Africa, by a team of mercenaries.įrost, who's been making his living off the grid as a spy-for-hire since going AWOL from the CIA, has just scored a trove of documents detailing intelligence secrets and government scandals from around the world when the chase begins the director choreographs the sequence to neatly introduce Frost's skills, then caps it by quite literally introducing the character: He ducks into the American consulate, announcing that 'My name is Tobin Frost.' But instead of the bitter drunk of that film, Safe House's Tobin Frost is a man still in top form, both physically and in his ability to psychologically manipulate those around him. It's not a difficult manual to decipher - and with Safe House, Swedish director Daniel Espinosa follows the Scott-Washington playbook with a tedious fidelity.Īs in Man on Fire, Washington plays a former CIA operative who's long since left the agency. Washington's always playing a cool-under-pressure character who's asked to go above and beyond with life and death on the line, and the camera's always following the action with grainy photography and claustrophobically jittery close-ups. The director's frequent collaborations with Denzel Washington are guilty-pleasure entertainments - particularly the dark exploitation-lite of 2004's Man on Fire - but they're mostly built on a familiar template. It was only a matter of time before someone made a Tony Scott movie without Tony Scott.

Denzel washington safe house