Safe House

Safe House (2012) dir. Daniel Espinosa
Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Denzel Washington, Sam Shepard, Brendan Gleeson, Vera Farmiga

By Alan Bacchus

An unlikely success to be sure, Safe House surprisingly garnered over $120 million at the North American box office. Unfortunately, the story of a lowly CIA safe house operator who finally gets to see some action when a notorious counterspy arrives to stay with a lot of international baddies trailing behind plays like a decent though forgettable Tony Scott knockoff.

That said, we’re put into a unique setting for this picture, Cape Town, South Africa. Denzel Washington’s character, Tobin Frost (great name), is trading a secret file with a rogue CIA agent. After an attack by some big-nosed, slick haired and overall nasty looking gunmen, Frost escapes into CIA custody and is moved to a safe house. Enter Matt Weston (Reynold), a nebbish family man whose career is more like a glorified housekeeper. But when Frost arrives he finds himself eye to eye with a legendary international criminal.

When that big-nosed baddie returns to the fray and finds Tobin at the safe house, it becomes a desperate chase with Weston and Tobin forced to work together to survive. As expected, a few twists and turns in the action involve characters switching allegiances, ultimately revealing Tobin as the keeper of some of the CIA's darkest secrets.

The course of action and its execution play out with only adequate cinematic skills. It’s Daniel Espinosa’s first American film after his decent international hit Snabba Cash. That film showed some promise of a tough action filmmaker, but the underwhelming and turnkey nature of Safe House instills little hope that Espinoza will be anything special.

Reynolds and Washington, the great actors that they are, make a good duo. Denzel commands most of the film, playing his nebulous baddie role with the same kind of aplomb as recent minor hits Unstoppable and Book of Eli. Denzel can do so much with very little. He rarely needs to speak, instead showing the confidence of his character with action and reaction. All the other character actors, including Sam Shepard, Brendan Gleeson and Vera Farmiga, have grossly underwritten stock roles borrowed from other new millennium action thrillers.

The third act plays out the expected expression of mutual admiration and brotherly loyalty developed between Weston and Tobin, and the final gunfight, in which all the characters are blasting each other in one confined space, lacks any cinematic imagination. As such, despite very strong creative minds involved here, Safe House settles into ordinary boilerplate filmmaking.

**

Safe House is available on Blu-ray from Universal Home Entertainment.

Easy Money

Easy Money (2010) dir. Daniel Espinoza
Starring:Joel Kinnaman, Matias Padin Varela, Dragomir Mrsic

***

By Alan Bacchus

Did you see Safe House this weekend? Well, the job that got director Daniel Espinoza the gig was probably his home spun Swedish thriller Easy Money, which premiered at TIFF 2010 and was repped by the Weinstein company.

Jorge is a Spanish-speaking immigrant who has recently escaped from prison and reunited with his pal and partner-in-crime. In conflict with Jorge is Mrado, part of an Eastern European mob with whom he has a beef in the competitive underground cocaine syndicate. The only Swede of the bunch is JW, a ladder-climbing university student secretly working as a cabbie in order to afford the expensive suits and other high-class accoutrements it takes to get in with the rich kids he idolizes. When presented with an opportunity to make some really big money, JW finds himself caught in the cocaine drug war between Jorge and Mrado.

Espinoza’s treatment of crime is in the world of Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet and Animal Kingdom version of cinema, a world treated with realism and characters painted with various shades of grey. Heroes and villains aren’t so easy to define. Espinoza is clever to subvert our expectations and shift around his heroes and villains, double-back on his characters and reveal realistic motivations for everyone involved.

The common denominator of the three characters is the desperate need for survival and the desire for security and success. For JW, it’s his need to escape the life of poverty from his childhood. For Mrado, it’s his young daughter he finds himself protecting. And Jorge’s sister and newborn niece prompt him to re-evaluate his priorities.

Each of the fine actors playing the roles brings freshness, deep commitment and an inhabitation of their characters. Dragomir Mrsic as Mrado gives the best performance, and his best scene is a touching car ride confession after he has taken custody of his daughter. In this scene he reveals the abuse he received from his father, which caused him to become the hardened criminal he is today.

The social realism visual effect is laid on thick – too thick, perhaps. The handheld camerawork is a given in these types of stories now, but Espinoza shoots his characters so tight all the time that the film is essentially a series of close-ups. As a result, the director loses the power of this cinematic tool.

With everything presented as a close-up, the world is too closed in visually, barely allowing us time to breathe. Consequently, Espinoza’s realism dies out towards the end and is replaced by heightened melodrama. The double-crosses, betrayals and bloody sacrifices of brotherhood in the third act take us into a less satisfactory sensationalized crime genre. Espinoza does leave us with one last fantastic scene before he cuts to black. It’s a terrific bookend to the opening scene, which completes JW’s dramatic arc in grand fashion.