MOVIE OF THE WEEK (2/10/12): SAFE HOUSE

"Seriously ... That is NOT where they're playing the Super Bowl this year!" Rookie CIA field agent Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) tries to direct wanted man (and fellow former CIA agent) Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington) in a scene from the Daniel Espinosa-directed action thriller SAFE HOUSE. Credit: © 2012 Universal Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

KEY VOICE CAST MEMBERS: Denzel Washington, Ryan Reynolds, Brendan Gleeson, Vera Farmiga, Sam Shepard, Ruben Blades, Robert Patrick and Nora Arnezeder

WRITER(S): David Guggenheim

DIRECTOR: Daniel Espinosa

WEB SITE: http://www.nooneissafe.com

THE PLOT: An old school-style action thriller, Safe House stars Ryan Reynolds as Matt Weston, a young CIA field agent who operates the agency's "safe house" in Capetown, South Africa. What is a safe house, you ask? A place where high profile prisoners, suspects and other people of that ilk can be housed - and interrogated - safely by the agency without fear of anyone getting inside.

Then again, Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington) isn't your average prisoner - and the people coming to get him aren't your average hit squad, either.

You see, Frost is a former CIA agent - and also believed to be the biggest traitor the agency has ever seen after going rogue a decade ago. Last spotted in Hamburg, Germany, Frost turns up in Capetown ... And a shootout promptly ensues following a meeting with British MI6 operative Alec Wade (Liam Cunningham), Frost seeks safety in the last place anyone would ever think he would turn up: The American consulate in Cape Town. Now needing Frost to be de-briefed by a team led by Senior Intelligence Officer Daniel Kiefer (Robert Patrick), CIA Branch Chief Catherine Linklater (Vera Farmiga) and Case Officer David Barlow (Brendan Gleeson) grant Weston the wish he's had for the past year: To finally be part of a big-time operation.

But as Weston quickly learns, nothing is going to be easy when it comes to dealing with Tobin Frost ... Or possibly even as it all seems ...

THE TAKE: In the wake of films such as Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and the recent Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (which I was FAR too nice to upon further review), it seems as if a movie is going to be an action movie, it has to have big, mindless sequences of impossible stunts and any focus on the motivation, logic and/or personality of its characters besides a bare bones approach has become the standard. [Sorry for the run on sentence - that's bad writing, I know, then again, those two films kind of specialized in it.]

Safe House, fortunately, is not a film of that type. Instead, it actually features characters with strong connections between them that arise from the excellent interplay among its three main actors.

A lot of people may think of Reynolds as a bit of a pretty boy whose body of work (National Lampoon's Van Wilder, Just Friends, The Proposal and even Green Lantern, etc.) is more akin to comedy (romantic or otherwise) and shoot 'em up roles than it is drama. Safe House, however, shows that the Reynolds who showed up in films like Buried does have more to him than just a pretty smile. In a role that requires him to show a bit of naivety and essentially grow into the character, Reynolds does just that, growing from an enthusiastic but inexperienced field agent to one who learns how to appropriately adapt, respond and react to the chaos around him.

In turn, Reynolds' character serves as a great bridge between those portrayed expertly by Washington – who channels a perfect mix of his Training Day character's survival mode logic with determination for justice that drove his CIA bodyguard John Creasy in Man On Fire – and the clichéd but effective pure by the book-ness exhibited by Farmiga and Gleeson. Reynolds initially has one mindset about the way things are, but in examining the actions of Washington and Gleeson, his character serves as a great platform into the story's "who's really playing who" nature.

Director Daniel Espinosa does a good job at balancing his pacing and action sequences, with the former not wasting any moments with non-essential details and the latter rarely venturing into 'OK, that's just crazy' chaos. In short, everything (OK, just about everything!) that happens in the movie makes sense ... Even if you, like me, figure out who the villain is and what's happening with about an hour left to go.

PARTING SHOT: A film that delivers action without being brainless without getting too cerebral for its own good, Safe House provides a solid 2 hours of entertainment that reminds us why it's good for Washington to be cold-blooded every once in a while ... And that Reynolds is smarter than many of his previous roles may have led one to believe.

RATING (OUT OF FOUR BUCKETS OF POPCORN):