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Safe House Denzel Washington

February 11, 2012 by · Comments Off on Safe House Denzel Washington 

Safe House Denzel Washington, In Safe House, Denzel Washington is back as a misunderstood anti-hero. This time he’s the grizzled and hoary-headed Frost, currently number one on the CIA’s most wanted list. He’s been selling the top secrets of the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community to the highest bidder for almost a decade.

Frost naturally has more enemies than you can shake a black ops book at, so it’s a big surprise to Agency bosses Catherine Linklater (Vera Farmiga) and David Barlow (Brendan Gleeson) when he walks into South Africa’s US consulate to get arrested.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The movie opens with Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds), a low-level CIA flunky who’s been based in Johannesburg for over a year without any action. He’s one of the many “housekeepers” (read: caretakers) of the titular safe houses that the Agency uses for operations around the world for billeting, incarceration, and the occasional information extraction.

Desperate to move on and join his French girlfriend (the requisite eye candy, played by Nora Arnezeder) who’s being transferred to France, Weston is waiting for a chance to prove himself.

“How am I supposed to get more experience by staring at four walls all day?” he complains to Gleeson.

In the spy game, you need to be careful just what you wish for. A double cross is revealed as a triple cross and so on and it’s still just another day at the CIA. See, at the same time that Weston was complaining to his superiors in Langley that he wants a transfer, Tobin Frost was trying to make a big deal go down smoothly.

Now in custody at Weston’s facility, the US extraction team —headed by Robert Patrick in a great cameo role as the squad leader— starts to question Frost in that very special and none-too-tender CIA way.

As if on cue, that’s when the unknown (and very well-trained) group that was hunting Frost breaches the safe house. All protocol flies out the window as everyone on the extraction team is overrun and killed.

At this point, Frost manages to suggest to the rookie Weston to “Remember rule number one: you are responsible for your house guest. I’m your house guest.”

So, on Frost’s urging, they flee the safe house. All the fun begins there.

This is an explosive and promising action debut by director Daniel Espinosa. There are plenty of spy thrills and shoot `em ups as Weston tries his damnedest to re-transfer Frost to another facility.

What should be just an average action flick is elevated to big air with its breakneck editing pace, an excellent movie score, and well-timed plot revelations. The galloping beat just never lets up.

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