Synopsis
A dangerous CIA renegade resurfaces after a decade on the run. When the safe house he's remanded to is attacked by mercenaries, a rookie operative escapes with him. Now, the unlikely allies must stay alive long enough to uncover who wants them dead.
Votre Filmothèque
Cast
- Denzel WashingtonTobin Frost
- Ryan ReynoldsMatt Weston
- Vera FarmigaCatherine Linklater
- Brendan GleesonDavid Barlow
- Sam ShepardHarlan Whitford
- Rubén BladesCarlos Villar
- Nora ArnezederAna Moreau
- Robert PatrickDaniel Kiefe
- Liam CunninghamAlec Wade
- Joel KinnamanKeller
- 78
Austin Chronicle
Director Espinosa stages the endless action with a tremendous flair that recalls John Woo's grittier moments, and cinematographer Oliver Wood, who shot Woo's finest Hollywood moment, "Face/Off," gives the whole violent show a downright brackish look that borders on the sublime. - 67
Entertainment Weekly
Compared with a superior potboiler like "Salt," which messed with your brain in entertainingly far-fetched ways, Safe House is action-movie porridge gussied up into a less-clever-than-it-seems mystery. - 60
Village Voice
[A] scattered but not totally disagreeable CIA conspiracy thriller. - 60
Arizona Republic
Too often Washington is made to simply sit and observe -- which is not a fatal mistake because he is such a good actor that even then he's worth watching. Worse, though, at times he's gone altogether. That's not the only flaw in the fairly straightforward thriller, but it's the biggest. - 58
The A.V. Club
Safe House does altogether too good a job establishing Washington as a seemingly unbeatable adversary: He brings so much gravity to his role that Reynolds seems hopelessly overmatched. - 50
Variety
In contrast with the fragmented kineticism of Paul Greengrass' "Bourne" movies, there's no existential dimension to the shattered-glass aesthetic here; it's just raw, chaotic action, inelegantly shot and staged but no less unnerving for it. - 50
The Hollywood Reporter
Terse and understated, this is a spy vs. spy tale designed to minimize talk and maximize action, not at all a bad thing in movies but over-worked to near-exhaustion here. - 50
ReelViews
The pacing is uneven, the frenetic action is rarely suspenseful, the dialogue is neither witty nor intelligent, and the anticlimactic endgame drags out to an improbable conclusion.