Denzel Washington never fails to deliver, with the big screen legend virtually guaranteed to offer up a charismatic and eminently watchable performance, regardless of the quality of the movie he appears in. Indeed, the 66 year-old has starred in plenty of mediocre action thrillers over the last three decades, but his work in them has never been an issue.
Throwing Washington together with Ryan Reynolds in an action-packed $85 million blockbuster felt like a shoo-in for huge box office success, and while Safe House did manage to perform admirably, a global haul of $208 million was still viewed as a disappointment given the talent involved.
It finds both actors firmly within their genre wheelhouse, with Reynolds cast as the fast-talking rookie CIA agent way out of his depth when he’s forced on the run with Washington’s alleged traitor after an assassination attempt gone wrong. The plot is about as predictable as these sorts of movies can get, but the central duo unsurprisingly deliver the goods and play off each other well.
Having already found a second life on Netflix when it was added to the content library back in October, Safe House is once again enjoying a resurgence on streaming, where it’s currently the seventh most-watched title on Hulu. A-list stars in glossy genre films are never going to go out of fashion, and there are few names out there that possess more combined wattage than Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds.
A second installment was mooted at one point before the numbers came in, but as we all know, Denzel doesn’t really do sequels. That being said, Safe House remains an underrated and entertaining enough entry into the saturated world of shady government espionage movies, so it’s not surprising to find it doing well on Hulu.