‘Safe House,’ ‘Haywire’: Watch Them Back To Back

The flashy Denzel Washington thriller Safe House will probably gross in a few hours what Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire has made in several weeks, but if you like action you ought to catch both back to back. Soderbergh’s film is a reaction to the jangled, high-impact style of Safe House and its ilk.

Which is not to say I didn’t have a good time with Denzel and company’s slick, state-of-the-art engineering. Safe House is fashioned to suit Washington’s most successful persona: the bad guy who’s so cool that he inspires you even as he poses a threat to the social order. He plays Tobin Frost, a CIA agent who wrote the book on modern interrogations before becoming the company’s most notorious traitor. Now, he has no allegiances and no relationships outside of work — he only takes pleasure in old and expensive wine.

As the movie opens, Frost is selling especially incendiary intelligence in South Africa when he’s set upon by unknown assassins — who are expert enough to scare him into taking refuge at the nearby American Embassy, where at least he knows he won’t be killed. Promptly arrested, he’s transported to a safe house managed by frustrated junior agent Matt Weston, played by Ryan Reynolds. As Weston watches more senior agents interrogate Frost, the safe house is breached, and with gunfire coming closer, he finds himself alone with the soft-talking traitor, who tells Weston that he must protect him.