It was only a matter of time before someone made a Tony Scott movie without Tony Scott.
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. 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. 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.
As in Man on Fire, Washington plays a former CIA operative who’s long since left the agency. 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. 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.
Frost, 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.”
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. The opportunity to prove his mettle arrives with the extraction team and their fugitive, who has been brought here for some “enhanced interrogation.”
