Philip French 

Safe House – review

This espionage thriller with Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds chasing round the veld really isn't much kop, writes Philip French
  
  

safe house denzel
Denzel Washington in 'espionage film by numbers' Safe House. Photograph: PR

Back in 1976 when Len Deighton published Twinkle Twinkle Little Spy, not long after John le Carré gave us Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, there was a competition to provide similarly desperate titles for spy thrillers. The winner, I recall, was "One Potato, Two Potato, Three Potato, Spy". By this token, Safe House, an espionage film by numbers set in South Africa, might have been called "Spy on Kop". Tyro CIA agent Ryan Reynolds, managing the agency's little-used safe house in Cape Town, is suddenly given the task of protecting the agency's most brilliant officer, Denzel Washington, a rogue agent who has just decided to come in from the cold. A rival organisation with moles in the agency's Washington HQ is out to get him, and its thuggish henchmen chase the pair around Table Mountain and out into the veld with occasional pauses to bandage wounds and reload between battles. Eventually, and inevitably, they realise they're both involved in a dirty business that serves no one's interests. There is scarcely anything in the film that touches on South Africa politically, culturally or geographically, and one can only suppose that the script was relocated there to take advantage of local tax breaks.

 

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