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88The action is contained within a coherent dramatic structure and the puzzle-box paranoia of spy-agency protocol.
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78Director 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.
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75A gritty spy thriller directed by relative newcomer Daniel Espinosa, and a film that -- despite the occasional misstep -- ends up being a taut, suspense-filled ride.
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75Safe House rockets along, taking a familiar formula and making it work - hard.
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70Though Safe House may be too violent and nihilistic for everyone's taste, it does have several crackerjack action sequences.
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70Essentially and very effectively a rollicking smash-and-crash chase movie that happens to be surprisingly well acted.
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67Movies don't come any brawnier than Safe House, and all that chaotic mayhem eventually beats the plot to a pulp.
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67Compared 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.
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63Safe House has two powerful performances at its core, a hectic plot, a huge body count and a mild sense of déjà vu amid the pulse-quickening tension.
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63It'd be unwise to dismiss Safe House as merely a clone of Tony Scott's manically inclined vision.
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63Director Espinosa shoots virtually everything in tight but wobbly close-up, and the human and vehicular combat often brakes right at the edge of visual incoherence. Just as often the brakes give out completely.
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60Tolerably exciting spycraft, but stuck with a see-through plot. Washington and Reynolds are watchable, but not exactly stretched by these roles.
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Feb 9, 201260Safe House isn't the most original of plots - it feels like a loose amalgamation of ten other spy flicks - but director Espinosa infuses his production with some bold choices, both in terms of technics and twists.
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60It's a decent February movie that smartly extends Washington's God-on-the-run character.
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60Too 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.
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Feb 8, 201260[A] scattered but not totally disagreeable CIA conspiracy thriller.
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58There are several things to enjoy here. The use of motel service-industry code words by the safe-house staff is dryly funny.
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58Safe 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.
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50Moderately enjoyable, in its exhausting way. [5 March 2012, p. 87]
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50Safe House may strike you as a brilliant movie, provided you've seen fewer than, say, 10 spy thrillers.
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50Worse, Safe House asks us to believe that Ryan Reynolds can outclass Denzel Washington in the art of being a hard-ass. Not on this planet, baby.
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50A movie with a double-crossing intelligence plot that's so generic it's an irritating intrusion in a lively chase through the streets and shantytowns of Cape Town, South Africa.
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50Safe House is a sturdy enough thriller, but one that consistently defaults to the less interesting of its two lead characters.
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Feb 9, 201250Swedish director Daniel Espinosa isn't as adept at chase scenes as "Bourne" director Paul Greengrass: We sometimes lose track of who's supposed to be where and which direction the bullets are flying.
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50I'm not getting the most of his (Washington) charisma or enough of that million-dollar dental work. I'm not getting the joy, and I miss that.
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Feb 9, 201250Espinosa never conveys any sort of perspective on the material, as Scott does through his obsessive attention to production detail; the stylization feels empty, distracting from whatever simple pleasures the routine plot (involving double agents and stolen microchips) might have delivered.
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50Crash. Kick. Stab. Punch. Talk (briefly). Smash. Chase. Screech. Shoot. Mumble. That's the wearying pattern of Safe House. Had "think" been an action verb, the movie might have risen above the knee-jerk excitement of the second-tier, "Bourne"-style spy thriller. But it never does.
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50The 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.
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50Terse 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.
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50In 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.
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40It was only a matter of time before someone made a Tony Scott movie without Tony Scott.
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40Good actors like Vera Farmiga and Brendan Gleeson show up to bust balls and bark expository dialogue with check-in-the-bank-yet? proficiency. Add in a couple of dully pro forma narrative twists to keep you awake in between shots of distractingly exotic South African scenery, and you've got a first-quarter Hollywood release par excellence. Meaning not.
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40Safe House is a twisted claw of a movie, a picture so visually ugly that, to borrow a line from Moms Mabley, it hurt my feelings.
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40Safe House devolves into unexciting action scenes that feel left over from the "Bourne" flicks and are peopled with cloak-and-dagger stereotypes.
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25All of which makes me sad about Denzel Washington's disillusioning participation. I forgive him if the money was irresistible enough to pay off a mortgage or put his kids through Harvard, but Safe House is total junk, and he is one of the producers.
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25Safe House is an idea for a movie. It's a few blustery gestures in the direction of a story, with five good actors doing their best, trying to hold up the barest frame of an idea, while investing the surrounding emptiness with all the truth they can muster.