THIS fantasy intelligence-agent actioner is Swedish director Daniel Espinosa’s fourth feature. Oliver Wood has shot it mainly with a shaky camera in available light. What they have confected does little justice to its underlying premise.

Alarms sound at Foggy Bottom when star CIA agent Tobin (Denzil Washington) walks in to the US consulate in Johannesburg after being nine years on the run for stealing intelligence data.

When the CIA team gently waterboards Tobin, he tells them nothing.

They send him to a local safe house kept by relatively unfledged agent Matt (Ryan Reynolds) who yearns for an assignment that will let him demonstrate his mettle and perhaps get brought back to DC and promoted.
Matt has suddenly got the assignment of his career. It’s his duty to take care of Tobin. But hard men of Middle-Eastern appearance will kill to get what Tobin has.

Insofar as “Safe House” purports to display CIA operational procedures, on the basis of numerous sundowners with a close friend who retired as a deputy director of CIA and about whose honesty I was always confident, I think it misses the mark. But wot the hell? It’s crammed with violence, bangs, demolition derbies around the streets of Jo’burg, dead guys and blood. Will anybody know the difference? Alas, writer David Guggenheim does not. An idea like this deserves better material.

At Dendy