SAFE HOUSE

“SAFE HOUSE” (Denzel Washington & Ryan Reynolds)

This was disappointing. I expected a more intelligent thriller. I don’t really care what a film is rated; R, PG-13 or whatever, because I now realize that all I need to know is – How many car chases are there and how many weapons are fired (Total # of bullets fired will suffice) In ‘Safe House’ the answers are too many and too many. With Denzel in the cast, I was hoping to see something much more intriguing and much less ‘Vin Diesel-ish’.
They had a pretty good premise; Matt Weston (Reynolds) works for the CIA, but he doesn’t have a glamorous job. He basically baby-sits a facility in Cape Town, South Africa where nothing ever happens. He constantly begs his superior (Brendan Gleeson) to get him into the real world of being an agent.
Denzel plays Tobin Frost; a rogue agent that’s wanted for selling information to the highest bidder. When Tobin gets his hands on some incriminating data, he is immediately set upon by a gang of thugs with automatic weapons that don’t seem to care how many people they have to gun down as long as one of them is Frost. Tobin’s only escape route seems to be to turn himself in and is whisked to Matt’s safe house. When the facility is compromised by the thugs and the men that brought Frost in are gunned down one by one, Tobin tells Matt, “They want me alive, but you?They’ll kill.”
We later learn that's a lie because the number of bullets the thugs fire at Tobin runs well into the hundreds of thousands.
The story then becomes an hour long chase scene as Matt & Frost attempt to elude the thugs in one reckless car chase scene after another – with hundreds of thousands of bullets being fired from the windows of speeding cars and into Cape Town neighborhoods. I had to laugh out loud when at one point the thugs come to a screeching halt and stop firing their weapons at the sight of a singular police squad car.
Vera Farmiga virtually copies the same role she had in the much more interesting “Source Code” as she plays a CIA agent that stands in a control room, takes phone calls from CIA head Sam Shepherd and argues with Brendan Gleeson.
The one thing ‘Safe House’ offers that most shoot ’em up’s don’t – most of the characters actually get shot during the 14,872,693 bullets that are fired.