Movie Review: Safe House

I can never quite get my head around Denzel Washington being a bad-ass. In my mind he's an ordinary, everyman hero-of-the-people so whenever he plays a psycho or supervillain I always feel like I'm watching my dad dress up in a Freddie Krueger Halloween costume. It might be scary, but I know it's still my dad underneath.

In Daniel Espinosa's Safe House, Denzel plays Evil Jack Bauer, a former CIA agent who's been off reservation so long, redemption seems impossible (should he even wants it in the first place). When Dark Denz comes into possession of a secret MacGuffin that could bring down some very bad people in very high places, suddenly everybody wants a piece of him: from waterboarding aficionado Robert Patrick (memo to the former X-Files Agent Doggett: who ate all the cow pies?) to sneaky espionage chiefs Sam Shepard, Brendan Gleeson and Vera Farmiga.

That's certainly a top notch cast... though the real star of Safe House is Ryan Reynolds, playing a vulnerable young pup determined to teach old dog Denzel some new tricks. Despite starring in the worst film of 2011, Reynolds can do little wrong in my eyes. He's an action hero with a heart and it's good to see him flexing his acting chops beyond his usual twinkly-eyed smart-ass roles to stand up against Denzel and co. in a Bourne-esque thriller that benefits from a fast-paced (and only occasionally implausible) plot and imaginative South African locations.

A cut above your average action movie then... if you can swallow Denzel as a bad-ass. (Robert Patrick certainly looks like he's game.)

Movie Review - The Guard

One of my favourite movies of recent years was In Bruges, in which Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson play two feckless Irish hitmen laying low in Belgium after a job gone wrong. I haven't laughed so much at the cinema since the Dude and Walter went bowling. So I was excited by the prospect of The Guard which sees Gleeson back on familiar territory (and back in his Irish homeland) in a story from the same stable: writer / director John Michael McDonagh is the brother of Martin, who performed those same duties on In Bruges.

Gleeson plays an Irish Garda (police man) with a cynical, anti-establishment attitude and no time whatsoever for the American FBI Agent (a wonderfully deadpan Don Cheadle) invading his patch to investigate a billion dollar drug-smuggling operation. Gleeson is the sort of cop who steals drugs from the pockets of dead joyriders and books prostitutes for the weekend, while also caring for a terminally ill mother (a wry, sly, bone-dry Fionnula Flanagan). It's a tremendous, multi-layered performance and Gleeson gets all the best lines (unlike In Bruges, where Colin Farrell stole the show). Sometimes the western Irish accents were a little too thick for my cloth ears to catch every joke, but there's more than enough to go round and entertaining support from Liam Cunningham, David Wilmot and Mark Strong (who you might imagine would be too big for this sort of villainous bit-part nowadays - but I'm glad he's not).

It's a shame The Guard will suffer in comparison to In Bruges because set against any other recent comedy, it'd come out on top. It's good to see that the first McDonagh brother didn't nab all the movie-making talent... I'll be following them both from now on. Excellent use of John Denver in the closing credits too.