Like Greengrass’s Jason Bourne movies ( Supremacy and Ultimatum), Espinosa’s film has several cramped-space fights, plenty of bird’s-eye point-of-view shots and a chic, garish color scheme. (MORE: See Corliss’s review of The Book of Eli)Įspinosa directs Safe House very much in the Paul Greengrass action-film style. Here he taps Espinosa, a Swede whose 2010 drug-crime drama Easy Money revealed a ready-for-Hollywood flashiness. But he also had good luck with the Hughes brothers two winters ago in The Book of Eli. Washington’s go-to director for action movies is Tony Scott ( Crimson Tide, Man on Fire, Deja Vu, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 and Unstoppable), with a stopover for Scott’s older brother Ridley ( American Gangster). But at heart Reynolds is a bland Canadian, a dishier Brendan Fraser. Frost quickly spots Matt’s callow vulnerability: holding a gun to the young man’s head, he refuses to finish him off, saying, “I only kill professionals.” (Ouch, Matt must think: shoot me but don’t castrate me.) For the rest of the movie, which puts both men on the run from their assassins, Matt will sweat to prove he’s Frost’s kind of man. (Not wanting to disappoint his fans, Reynolds goes topless in the first few minutes.) In David Guggenheim’s script, Matt chafes at his menial CIA job as the safe-house landlord, and express his frustration by frequently hurting furniture. Matt, Frost’s reluctant protector in Safe House, is played by Ryan Reynolds, whose granite abs deserve their own security team. They might be wishing that Barack Obama had some of Washington’s grit and vinegar. 1 star among pollees who identified themselves as Democrats. (The Harris voters like their stars mature: John Wayne, dead since 1979, finished fifth this year.) Washington was also the No. This year he was tied for second, with Clint Eastwood, just behind Johnny Depp. That sullen majesty has made Washington, according to an annual Harris poll, the only actor chosen as one of the top three of favorite movie stars over the past six years. (MORE: See Mary Pols’ review of Washington in Unstoppable) Like Thomas Hobbes, they find it “solitary, poor, nasty brutish and short.” The characters he plays think life is no joke. Almost uniquely among contemporary actors, he doesn’t show his sunny side. But it’s the quiet grandeur, the imperious glower that set him apart. A Safe House colleague refers to Frost as “the black Dorian Gray,” and Washington, at 57, looks fit and fine. Washington, since he turned to action roles in mid-career, has been the pure or scarred hero, often enigmatic but rarely villainous. Can the actor impart satanic humor to a standard bad-genius role, which would be catnip for other Hollywood stars in their mid-50s like John Travolta and Bruce Willis? Not hardly. There’s one important wrinkle in Daniel Espinosa’s just-above-routine spy thriller Safe House: Frost is played by Denzel Washington. Expect Frost to mess with Matt’s mind as Hannibal Lecter did with Clarice Starling’s. Now the bear and the fawn are on their own. A moment later, the commando squad breaks into this very pregnable fortress and kills everyone not billed above the title: the rogue warrior Frost and the low-level keeper of the safe house, Matt Weston. Taken to a safe house, he is subjected to a brisk waterboarding by the local CIA chief apparently our authorities still thinks the technique works. So they are pleased and a little edgy when Frost, running for his life from some ruthless, nameless commando force, surrenders at the U.S. A top CIA operative who went rogue a decade ago, Frost has been an embarrassment to the agency higher-ups, who can’t stop or find him. Follow about every government in the world wants Tobin Frost dead.
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