Movie review by Russell Pinkston

Ex CIA and wanted international criminal Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington) walks into the U.S. Embassy in Cape Town, South Africa.  He is quickly moved to a “safe house”  to be  interrogated.   CIA agent Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) is the housesitter and hasn’t seen much action on this detail.  He hopes to move up and get a better assignment in the agency.  The safe house is breached by the men who were trying to kill Frost in order to retrive information he has that they don’t want to be seen.

Denzel Washington once again plays a bad guy…a role he is actually pretty good at playing.   He won an Best Actor Oscar for his bad guy performance in 2001’s Training Day.   Ryan Reynolds redeems himself somewhat from his last two movies (The Change-Up, Green Lantern).  Both Washington and Reynolds have good chemisty together on screen and pretty good writing.   Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air, Source Code),  Rubén Blades (Predator 2), Robert Patrick (Terminator 2: Judgement Day) and Sam Shepard (The Right Stuff) co-star. 

The movie does get a bit muddled in the middle and it’s definitely not as good as Training Day  (if you haven’t seen it…rent it now) but the directing (Daniel Espinosa) was decent and the acting was pretty good.   It’s not a movie you have to run out and seen in theaters so I say Wait and Rent It.