There’s something to be said for a movie that shows promise, makes a promise, and then keeps that promise. Some movies exceed their roots, and deliver more than they ever let you assume you would receive (I’m looking at you The Grey). Some movies crash to the ground, falling through the platform of expectations they had created  and landing in a smoldering heap.

In between those two extremes of quality are the films like Safe House. Films that keep their promise. Films that know their limits, and don’t attempt to push beyond them, but simply hope to exceed within them. They don’t play outside of their field, they don’t try to create new arenas of expectation. They just step back, look at what is expected of them, and say “yes, I can do that, and you’re going to love it.”

These questions create a kind of  existential McGuffin, driving a plot that doesn’t really have many twists or turns that aren’t expected. Frost and Weston must for a ragged team in order to escape danger, and all the while Weston has to keep an eye on his “buddy” to make sure that he doesn’t escape back into the wilderness. It’s a duplicitously symbiotic relationship, and Reynolds and Washington pull it off beautifully and capably.

But the plot isn’t the primary selling point here. That would be the intense, visceral, uncompromising action scenes.

Action is a hard thing to direct effectively; a space has to be created, characters have to fill and move within that space in a way that is comprehensible, and the stakes of the action have to be clearly delineate and modulated. Many films try to get along with only achieving some of these. Perhaps they will hope that our investment in the plot/characters will mask the nonsense of the action. Shaky-cam techniques shadow a lot of those sins of laziness. Then there are the films that hope over-the-top bombast will make up for the fact that the characters are ridiculous and unbelievable and lacking in empathetic connection.

Best of all is that even though Reynolds plays a novice, he’s not the usual movie-novice who has no idea what he is doing. In every situation his character equips himself well both in terms physicality and wits. He is truly a worth and capable reluctant compatriot for Frost. That means that there is never a break in the quality and tenor of the action scenes, making for a uniformly engaging experience.

All other actors play equally as well in their small, functional roles. Really, they are there to provide exposition, and they do so efficiently and directly without getting in the way of fresh set pieces. Who could ask for more?

Safe House is the perfect hamburger. The greatest grilled cheese. It delivers a product that exceeds the baseline but does not step outside of its own comfort zone, or the comfort zone of those who hope to consume it. In this way, it is better than the majority of the films that hope to capitalize on the boredom of filmgoers, and that makes it well worth seeing.

♥♥♥1/2