Safe House

Safe House: Reynolds and Washington both give great performances, but that didn't quite make the movie for me. The whole "chase" theme got old after a while, and the ending was just bizarre.

Safe House is yet another movie that was vaguely on my to-see list, then shelved, then revived by a Roeper review. Reynolds and Washington both give great performances here, but that didn't quite make the movie for me.  The whole "chase" theme got old after a while, and the ending was just bizarre.

At first, everything was really fast, and I had no idea what was going on. Then I got into it, and it was pretty interesting. Then towards the middle-end, I just got really sick of the action. I was like, "Okay, alright, chase, we get it! Chase chase chase, they should've just named it 'Neverending Chase Movie.'"

There are some good action sequences, and some good car chases. 

The fight at the end between Ryan and the other house keeper was just brutal. They reminded me of stags. Big, slow, wounded stags. I thought Matt might die after he got stabbed. That would've been an interesting direction to go. I wasn't expecting Frost to die, though. Washington did a great job with that scene. It was pretty touching, but I wasn't too upset to see him go. We weren't exactly invested in the character, and they made it pretty clear that he'd never really have a life, anyway.

That's part of the main problem I had with this movie, though. Everybody died. They paint such a horrible picture of the world. They make it seem like no matter what you do, once you join the CIA, you're fucked, because sooner or later they're going to fuck you over. They killed off Frost, Frost's forger buddy, the female CIA boss, the male CIA boss, the insurgent boss, everybody! And the ending, with Ryan and his girlfriend in Paris, is all happy. She's even happy to see him. Not mad at all anymore, nope.

But it's not happy ever after. Ryan's fucked. Did they think just because they said the file came from "an anonymous source" that we think Ryan's going to get away scot-free? It's like they said in the movie – every agency he just burned wants him dead. The CIA knows who released the file, and there's nothing keeping them from killing Matt themselves, or releasing that info to any of the agencies that want him dead now. It's just silly to play it off like everything's great.