Safe House

Directed by Daniel Espinosa

Starring Ryan Reynolds, Denzel Washington, Brendan Gleeson, Vera Farmiga, Sam Sheppard, and Joel Kinnaman.

So it’s the first Tuesday back at the pictures in a long time and I’ve already made my mind up it’s going to be a slam-dunk. Martyn and I polish off a bottle or red wine over vegetarian dinner, I put back about 80 ml of 102-proof Japanese whiskey that I’m convinced will cure you of any disease if you drink enough of it, and we walk over to the cinema with two tickets to see Denzel cut some people up. What could possibly go wrong?

Safe House. That’s what. And I suppose it’s Denzel’s fault for setting the bar so high. The guy is Malcolm X. He was in Training Day where he annihilates basically everybody. Book of Eli may well have been an awful movie but hot fuck does Denzel know how to decapitate people with a machete or what?!

And therein, dear readers, lies the problem. My expectations of how many guys Denzel is going to snuff out in any given movie are perhaps unreasonable. The guy is 57-years-old. Soon enough he’s going to be doing a remake of On Golden Pond with Alfre Woodard or Regina King or something. It was foolish of me to think he’d be sticking miniature bombs up Mexican dudes’ asses forever.

I’ll tell you who was a revelation, though. Fucking Ryan Reynolds. Holy shit, guys. I know that people have mixed feelings about him because he’s a bit of a goofball and his career as an action star isn’t full-blown but this dude is a sleeping tiger. Because he was in Van Wilder and Waiting... you expect the guy to just sort of kick around for comic relief and sleepwalk his way through the movie until BAM! he opens up a can of Zidane on a roomful of people.

Ryan’s “Oooohhh shiiiit!” moment in Safe House was when his cover as a CIA-operative is blown and he gets captured by a team of rent-a-cops, which I know makes him sound like a total Nancy but in his defence there’s nothing more dangerous than 10 guys with no high school diplomas pointing 9mm semi-automatics at you. People who live in L.A. will back me up on this. Ok, fine, but sly Ryan waits until these dudes have chilled out a bit, gets into a small office with 3-4 of them and greases fucking every last one of them like SHAZZANG in about 15 seconds. No joke, this guy has his hands tied behind his back too so he cock-slaps all of them until they’re unconscious. Seriously, the theatre was dead quiet and I couldn’t help but exclaim: “YEAH! Canada!” because Ryan Reynolds was representing like a champion.

So instead of writing a diatribe about how much of a piece of shit Safe House is (drunk or sober, believe me), I’m going to take a walk through memory lane and explain why you ought not fuck with Ryan Reynolds.

REASONS NOT TO FUCK WITH RYAN REYNOLDS

A career retrospective

1. Blade: Trinity 

At this point Ryan Reynolds was known mostly as a joker and was pretty much hired for this reason alone. Consequently, he is forced to deliver some of the most truly godawful lines in movie history (seriously, dude needs to call Parker Posey a “thundercunt” – that shit hurts). However, when time comes to throw down at the end of the movie, Reynolds is no slouch.

This guy has a mammoth boss battle with metal-toothed, vampire Triple H, who is so torqued out in this movie he could have killed Pattinson and that teenboy shirtless wolf dude no problem by smashing their heads together. Shit, I would run away from Triple H if he weren’t a vampire. But Ryan, what does Ryan do? He goes in swingin’. 

Of course Triple H eventually gets the upper hand because dude, Ryan Reynolds is mortal and Triple H is a fucking vampire, but before he can deliver a kill strike Ryan puts a silver bullet in his mouth and forces him to bite down on that sucker by administering the Mother of all Uppercuts. Seriously, Mike Tyson would need a length of rope and some wall hooks to keep his jaw from hitting the ground. 

2. Chaos Theory

Not very many people know about this movie and, granted, it’s really not an action flick by any means. It does contain Ryan Reynolds going from mild-mannered family man to bona fide nihilistic shit-disturber at the flick of a switch, however.

At the beginning of the movie he’s just a dude happily going about his own business, but when people start giving him underserved and disproportionately large amounts of shit he just goes ape on all of them. While drinking in a bar he happens upon a dock worker who made him late a day earlier and curbstomps him without breaking a sweat. His wife won’t get off his case about stuff he’s not responsible for so he abandons home, chases hoochies all over town, and does all the cool stuff they had planned to do as a couple.

He also discovers that his 7-year-old daughter may have been fathered by his best friend and his FIRST IMPULSE is to buy a shotgun and lure him into the woods. Dave Chappelle owes him a sketch entitled: When Keeping it Real Goes Right.

3. X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Dude splits an incoming bullet in half with a katana. DUDE.

4. Safe House

After seeing Safe House, I’m comfortable saying that Ryan Reynolds has one of the giantest pairs of brass balls ever. Basically, the movie is about him running a sleepy CIA safehouse in Cape Town and all hell breaking loose when Denzel’s former-operative/now-dangerous traitor gets brought in for interrogation. Hired guns who are after Denzel’s info blast the place to smithereens and Hollywood silliness ensues. Think Bourne minus artful direction and good action.

Ryan and Denzel make a narrow escape onto the streets and Ryan, still holding Denzel at gunpoint, commandeers a BMW and orders him:

Ryan: “Get in the trunk.”

Denzel: “The trunk. Are you serious? I'm Denzel fucking Washington.”

Ryan: “Yes. Get in NOW.”

Clearly the only reason Ryan didn’t tell him to suck a male camel’s dick and then pistol-whip him into the trunk is because Canadians err on the side of politeness. Of course during the subsequent car chase Denzel escapes the trunk and tries to whup Ryan Reynolds but this guy gets the drop on Denzel, steers the car into a parking garage mid-fistfight, recovers his gun, and steps out of the car all like “Wazzup, bitch!”

There’s a surprising and wonderful interim scene where Ryan has to sort out his love life and hustle his girlfriend out of town because spooks are everywhere looking to kill his ass dead. The urgency and nuance in his performance as he reveals his cloak-and-dagger lifestyle and urges her to board a train is magnificent. He has about 2-3 minutes to convey the torturous self-abnegation required of his role and characteristic of company men, while at the same time divulging a wellspring of emotional fragility and straight-up fucking longing for this woman. He acts the shit out of it.

There’s also the aforementioned scene where Ryan breaks his foot off in a couple security guards’ asses and then later the requisite Spy-vs-Spy fight they have in all the Bourne movies (you know, when Matt Damon goes toe-to-toe with another Treadstone agent and they just wallop the shit out of each other with everyday household items for five minutes). In Safe House this consists of Ryan following orders and bringing Denzel to a holding facility way out in the sticks where another lone CIA-operative greets him ominously.

This is probably the tensest, coolest part of the movie and the only 5-10 minutes worth watching, mostly because the other CIA guy is played by Joel Kinnaman and Joel Kinnaman is a boss. I understand no one knows who this kid is yet but you will soon. Once in a blue moon do you find an actor who has this much onscreen presence, charisma, and pure old-fashioned swagger. On top of which dude is going to be RoboCop in the franchise reboot. Yeah, RoboCop. The scene where he and Ryan bleed each other adds a couple pages to the hardcore handbook.

So there it is. To those of you who didn’t believe me when I said the whole thing would be an homage to Ryan Reynolds and his huge cod and thought I would actually talk about the movie, well… sorry. It really was just about Ryan Reynolds.

What can I say? He banged Scar-Jo. 
Go Canada.

Damage: 3/10 (pre-movie: 1/2 bottle red wine, 80 ml Nikka whiskey 51.4% ABV; during: 2 x 330 ml Stella Artois). I was so bored in this movie I couldn’t be bothered to drink more. Seriously.

Boozy rating: 2/10 (you’re better off staying in and renting any of the above-mentioned movies)