Movie Review “Safe House”

This was a truly explosive and edge of your seat thriller of a movie! You never seem to know what is fully going on, and who plays what roll, exactly. As soon as you seem to think that you have it figured out, something turns your thinking around. When things seem to slow down a little, so you figuratively can catch your breath, you can bet that very shortly thereafter, there will be something unexpected and loud to rock you back to life!             The story begins in Cape Town, South Africa, and does not bother with anything like slow build up. Right away, the explosions begin! This is a movie of intrigue and car chases and gun fights. It seems that Denzel Washington plays a lot of these types of movies, and perhaps that is his specialty, even. In this one, he plays Frost, a highly sought out, yet difficult to trace man of intrigue who is considered armed and extremely dangerous, always. Yet, in the midst of a deadly pursuit mere minutes into the movie, he finds himself with little to no choice but to give himself up to the American Embassy in South Africa, shocking the CIA and almost everybody else, too.             He is brought into questioning in a “Safe House” (hence the title of the movie), where we meet the other main character in the movie, Matt Westin, who is played by Ryan Reynolds. Westin makes his home here, and tries to portray living a normal life. He has a girlfriend with whom he shares a normal and stable relationship, and he wants to keep it that way. Yet, when Frost is taken in for questioning at this “safe house”, which is a secret government compound for detainment and interrogation, and which Westin disguises by a normal looking home, but is in charge of in a very real sense as a government agent, everything is compromised, including Westin’s carefully choreographed life, mostly sustained by lies he feeds to his girlfriend, the apparent love of his life.             The two are brought together by chance, and they both wind up on the run. Of course, they also keep running into each other, and the back and the forth makes the movie. They seem to hunt each other, yet throughout, they are also both hunted, in a complicated storyline that manages to keep you guessing throughout.             I will admit to hardly ever knowing what is playing in the movies, and I was not really aware of this one going in, either. The person that I was with chose it, and so, with a mental shrug, it seemed fine to give it a shot. Feeling tired after a full night working, and not even so much as a nap, I was actually worried about falling asleep, but the tensions start building in this one right away. There was one point where there was a lull, and with it being dark and warm, indeed my eyelids began to grow heavy there for a second or two. A very loud explosion in the movie rattled me out of that half waking state, however. The rest of the movie was a breeze to stay awake through! A very exciting and action packed movie, if that is the type of movie that you like to see!