Safe House (2012)

While having to write about Safe House, I find myself in a position that is unique in my critical career thus far. I may not be completely in the right to comment on, or much less criticize, this movie. I did not actually watch all of it. This is due to the fact that I had to leave the theater about half-way through and vomit. I am fully prepared to blame the movie for this, because it has been filmed with shaky-cam, the plague of the cinema. Yes, I probably should have actually eaten dinner instead of just those twizzlers, but the movie certainly wasn't helping. I don't understand why film-makers feel the need to utilize this atrocious form of visual nausea. At some point, it became the modern mindset that in all action movies, the camera must do what the characters are doing. If they are walking, the camera bounces along. If they are fighting, the camera spins in all crazy directions. This is a sickening creative decision becoming ever more popular and it does nothing whatever to benefit the movies.

Safe House stars Ryan Reynolds and Denzel Washington as a young government agent and a criminal respectively. The latter was being interrogated at the former's safe house which is breached, forcing the former to attempt to take the latter to a new safe area. The only trouble is that there are bad guys on the inside and, therefore, bad stuff is likely to happen. Now, though I did miss some stuff towards the end, I did see the ending and can assure you that nothing unexpected happens. This does eventually become a high adrenaline buddy movie and you can tell who the villain is from the first four minutes. This is not a remotely well-written movie, but anyone who will go out of their way to see it in the theater won't care about any of that. The story has one function: set up the action. I think that one of the things I most hate about modern action movies is this pretension the writers have that the story matters in the slightest. We will someday reach a stage in the movies where there will actually be nothing but ninety minutes of chases and fights without the other forty of pointless dialogue. That's one of the worst directions the movies can take, but stuff like Safe House proves it could easily happen.

From what I did see of the movie, I have very little opinion of it. It makes no effort to vary from the action formula, making it very predictable and relatively uninteresting. I also can't seem to invest too much interest in the two stars, who are among the elite of popular actors. Washington isn't bad, but we've seen him do this stuff before, though perhaps not as politely, and I frankly don't care for Reynolds too much. He is an actor content to be popular now with apparently no desire to do something meaningful with whatever talent he may or may not possess. Kinda like this movie, which pulls every trick in the book to please the bored masses. Here you will find much car chasing, shooting, and shouting of taglines, but not much else.

5/10