Review of Safe House (2012) by Smirky — 16 Feb 2012

I always love denzel washington. He plays a great hero character,and also makes a great bad guy. Here he's some of each, which is interesting to watch, but also confusing to the plot. Most of the movie I felt like I was trying to catch up with what was going on, between the hyperactive shaky camera chases and spy technobable.

.lots of people talking about 'clearences' 'black ops' etc..by the end of the movie you wonder what it was all about, and why the characters felt it was so damned important. You wish a movie like this had something a little more directly threatening hanging in the balance, like say, a nuclear bomb or poisin gass cloud or something.

Safe house is mostly a bunch of shadowy figures barely identified running around killing each other for some information on a disk of some sort, which could be embarrasing to some other people we don't know about, and therefore may or may not be worth money.

At the end of all that chasing and bloodshed the payoff seems so blandly inconsequential you wonder how so many people had to get killed in the first place. And speaking of the killings, the director seemed fixated on cheap jump scares over and over.

If you're watching the movie and two people are speaking casually, watch out, there's a shooting coming. So many people were surprised by bullets when they weren't looking that I left the theatre thinking they could have alternatively titled this !!BANG!!!: the movie.