Movie reviews

Be careful what you wish for.

Kicking his heels as the caretaker of a Safe House (15A) in Cape Town, CIA agent Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) presses his boss David Barlow (Brendan Gleeson) for a more exciting post. Soon, however, Matt has all the excitement he can handle, when rogue CIA agent and suspected traitor Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington) walks into the US embassy and hands himself up. Frost, a master of psychological manipulation, is on the run from a ruthless gang who want the multi-billion computer chip he has injected into his leg — but the gangsters aren’t the only players who want the chip. Swedish director Daniel Espinosa makes his English-language debut with a taut thriller, giving David Guggenheim’s script a propulsive quality that is sustained by a number of set-piece action sequences (including an impressively destructive car chase through the streets of Cape Town), although the performances of Reynolds and Washington are equally important in maintaining tension throughout. Essentially, Matt Weston is a greenhorn with little experience in the field, and is given the runaround by wily old fox Frost throughout, but Matt hangs on to his captive by the skin of his gritted teeth, determined to prove himself first to his bosses back in Langley, but also to his beloved Ana (Nora Arnezeder). Washington, meanwhile, oozes charm and menace in equal measure, playing Frost as an ice-cold killer who is nevertheless capable of extraordinary generosity. Aficionados of the paranoid thriller won’t be hugely surprised by the back-stabbings that regularly crop up in the twists and turns that drive Safe House to its finale, but most will be well satisfied by a deftly executed hardboiled tale.

It’s safe to assume that any movie that arrives with the name James Ellroy attached will err on the hardboiled side, but Rampart (16s) rather over-eggs the pudding. Woody Harrelson stars as Dave ‘Date Rape’ Brown, a LAPD cop who embodies everything that is bad about modern policing, and then some. A stone-cold killer who hides behind his shield, Brown is a vicious xenophobe who takes back-handers, frames his victims, and generally behaves like Attila the Hun on a kaleidoscopic variety of bad drugs. Caught on camera almost beating an innocent man to death, Brown finds himself hung out to dry by an LAPD anxious to divert media attention away from another scandal, and is soon spiralling out of control. A shaven-headed Harrelson is suitably intense in the lead role, and gets strong support from Sigourney Weaver, Steve Buscemi, Robin Wright and Ned Beatty, but the story demands too much from a single character. The implausibility of his character undermines the tone of gritty realism established by director Oren Moverman.