3/1/2024 0 Comments Safe house 2012Nothing ever happens in Joburg no one needs the safe house. Despite having this tricked out house to keep (though for some reason he doesn’t live there), Matt is bored stiff. There are multiple passages within it that look designed by an acolyte of Ken Adam rather than a civil servant, a whole series of heavy security doors activated by various personalized means, interrogation cells and, of course, a room full of high-tech weaponry. This isn’t the sort of safe house we’ve read about in Deighton or le Carré (boring, nondescript apartments with second-hand furniture and grim, government-style décor) this is a high-tech establishment that truly lives up to the name (or should live up to it, anyway when its big moment comes, though, it offers little protection). Reynolds plays Matt Weston, the “housekeeper” (one of many terms in the film borrowed from le Carré) of a CIA safe house in Johannesburg, South Africa. If you’ve got safe houses and moles and car chases and shootouts, I’m really not that difficult to please. Perhaps I’m more critical because I (like most readers of this blog, I'd hazard) have seen more spy movies than the average moviegoer, but then again that means (as regular readers are well aware) that I have an extremely high threshold for spy clichés. They merely recycle the familiar and do it in a generally inferior fashion to what we’ve seen before. ( Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol is a perfect example of the latter sort of success.) Espinosa and screenwriter David Guggenheim, unfortunately, do neither. Either they can present something original amidst the expected tropes (even This Means War at least offers a fresh twist, even if it fails to pull it off), or they can follow the paint-by-numbers pattern established by the Bond movies and Hitchcock and tweaked over the years by the likes of Robert Ludlum and Paul Greengrass-and do it so well that nobody cares. In a genre as repetitive as the spy genre is (let's be honest), filmmakers generally have two routes to go. There are good moments in Safe House, but none that spy fans haven’t seen at least a dozen times before. Ultimately, though, while it succeeds in keeping its audience entertained for two hours they probably won’t miss, it becomes painfully clear that it’s not a Bourne movie, that star Ryan Reynolds is not Matt Damon, and that (as we’ve seen demonstrated time and again since 2004), few if any directors besides Paul Greengrass are capable of pulling off quick-cut, shaky-cam action scenes and making them thrilling to behold rather than confusing and unspectacular. Or at least it wants you to think it’s a Bourne movie. As evidenced by its poster, which duplicates The Bourne Ultimatum’s 1-sheet so precisely (see them side by side here) that if the two films weren’t from the same studio it would be a clear case of plagiarism, Daniel Espinosa’s Safe House desperately, desperately wants to be a Bourne movie.
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