'Safe House' plays too safe with Washington

Denzel Washington is always good, but he's best when he's bad.

Director Daniel Espinosa would have done well to remember that in his film "Safe House." Certainly Tobin Frost, the rogue CIA agent Washington plays, has a murderous reputation, and he snaps a few necks along the way. But too often Washington is made to simply sit and observe -- which is not a fatal mistake, since he is such a good actor that even then he's worth watching.

Worse, though, at times he's gone altogether. That's not the only flaw in the fairly straightforward thriller, but it's the biggest.

When Washington is paired with Ryan Reynolds' Matt Weston, an inexperienced agent trying to bring him in, the movie is intriguing; you can sense Frost seeping into Weston's consciousness, despite Weston's best efforts to prevent it. ("I'm already in your head," Frost tells a defiant Weston at one point, and you can tell they both know it's true.)

Weston has spent 12 months guarding a safe house in South Africa -- a safe house with no one in it. He has a beautiful girlfriend in medical school (Nora Arnezeder), who knows nothing of his real work. Not that it's very exciting. Weston spends his hours on duty bored out of his skull. He openly campaigns with his superior, David Barlow (Brendan Gleeson) for a better assignment, but for the time being he's stuck where he is.

Enter Frost -- literally. After conducting some nefarious business and escaping assassins in a chaotic chase scene, Frost turns himself in to the U.S. consulate. This is a man the government has been seeking for nine years, who deposits himself on the doorstep. Under the orders of Harlan Whitford (Sam Shepard), the assistant CIA director, Frost is transferred to Weston's safe house, which is almost immediately attacked. Amid the carnage, Frost convinces Weston that they need to escape to stay alive -- keeping Frost alive being part of Weston's mission, after all.

So they go on the lam. Weston knows his job is to get Frost, evidently the most wanted man on the planet, into some form of traditional custody. But for reasons that sound sort of ridiculous, no extraction teams can reach them for 18 hours, so they have to just kind of mill around and wait. You know, babysitting the most dangerous killer in the world. Alone.