No one is safe in this house

Some people meditate. Others indulge in jigsaw puzzles to wind down from their hard days of work. There must be a strong and vibrant enough segment of the general population that prefers to attend ridiculously non-intellectual movies as a great way to decompress from the stress and arduous mental tasks of their workweeks.

While Safe House attempts to instil intelligent aspects of its characters, plot and storyline, it’s really as banal and hackneyed as Avatar purporting to be a fresh take on the ‘outsider saviour’ tale.

Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) is a babysitter for the CIA. He watches over a safe house in Cape Town, South Africa, but it never gets used. Matt is basically a demoralized low-level agent, bored out of his mind, waiting for something exciting to happen and hopeful that it helps him further his career at the same time.

Enter Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington). The ex-CIA agent has a high psychological aptitude and is known for how well he manipulates people with his words. He’s not Hannibal Lecter but then again, Lecter was no Tobin Frost.

Years ago, Frost went rogue and became an international criminal. He acquired secret files that make several worldwide peacekeeping agencies look like crime syndicates. He’s on the run from everybody including a mercenary named Vargas (Fares Fares) so he walks in to the American embassy, turning up at Weston’s safe house in short order.

Just as Frost is being waterboarded to divulge the location of the files, Vargas shows up with several heavily armed thugs, all intent on acquiring the same information before killing everyone on site.

Everyone, that is, except Frost who manages to escape with the help of Weston. Now the two men are on the run and unsure who to trust. This wouldn’t be a popcorn movie, after all, without a good old-fashioned double cross and a twist at the end. Could this chase be the work of an operative with ulterior motives in the midst? Once you are aware of all of the players in the play, it shouldn’t take any competent viewer long to piece together the obvious signs that modern movie making relies on to point out perpetrators. Could it be Sam Barlow (Brendan Gleeson), Weston’s gruff mentor, or Catherine Linkater (Vera Farmiga), a career-driven CIA operative, or even CIA Director Harlan Whitford (Sam Shepard), a guy whose job it is to be angry and smart at the same time? Or is there someone else behind the scenes?

Safe House is the UFC version of a tame and lame action movie: there’s still a lot of meeting room scenes interspersed among all of the mixed martial arts grappling on the ground and kicking ’em while they’re down. Bear witness to too many hand-to-hand fights, too many car chases, too many gun battles, and too many people being cut, bloodied, broken, beaten and killed.

In between all of this pinball-paced action through the streets of Cape Town, the audience gets a chance to breathe by watching Barlow, Linkater, and Whitford stand around and talk. This makes the pacing of Safe House about as up and down as a pogo stick jumper on a trampoline. It’s fast and it’s slow and then it’s faster and then it’s slower.

While this is essentially brainless, there are still moments of good acting, bordering on great. Washington and Reynolds both know how to demonstrate their emotive prowess. An actor’s face is meant to be expressive and these two know what they’re doing. They have many colours available to them to paint on their canvases, so to speak.

Farmiga, Shepard and Gleeson always make for strong characters with much audience likeability. They play their parts well enough to make one yearn for more of the slow scenes with them standing around talking.

Safe House is meant to be a fast and furious romp, a macho and madcap thriller with a supersmart Frost at the centre of everything, controlling the action as best to serve him. The movie only achieves half of that; the rest of the time it’s about as interesting as a too long meeting that keeps spinning in circles.