Movies

Director Daniel Espinosa brings a spy versus spy story to South Africa in a fast-moving action thriller that rushes you with its pace and doesn't bog you down with intelligence gathering, be it in the plot or the script.

Untested Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) is the keeper of a CIA-run safe house in Cape Town. Soon he is taking charge of renegade uber-agent Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington). All hell breaks loose as several agents storm the supposedly safe house and Tobin and Weston are on the run, Tobin in a bid for freedom out of the country and Weston trying to get his charge back into the US embassy.

Washington is ideal for practically any role, and he is well cast here as the permanently alert and able Tobin. Reynolds plays his role well as a rookie agent caught between his naive patriotism and his slowly developing mistrust of the CIA machine. In being forced to say goodbye to his sweetheart Ana (Nora Arnezeder), Weston provides the only character with any emotional depth.

The ending can be sniped at from a mile away and the script is there really just as backdrop to the continual action sequences, that are often repetitious. In one initial scene where Tobin gets into Weston's head, creating doubt in his patriotic role, I thought there might be some depth and depiction of the manipulation and double-guessing that would warrant an intelligent spy movie.

But no, out come the guns and the fists and any potential nuance is lost.

Given its failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, maybe the CIA had a hand in this movie.

It's a fast-paced ride with very accurate depictions of many forms of violence, but Safe House is not an agency for central intelligence. Teens and action buffs will love it.