Safe House Review: As Safe As Actioners Come

Jamie Marshall’s Safe House is a fairly predictable actioner that never manages to excite, despite including a couple of fun shootouts.

Safe House is, then, a middle-of-the-road affair, much like many of its direct-to-DVD predecessors: a competently made action picture that, nevertheless, isn’t particularly interesting, exciting or well thought-out. It’s got a couple of visually arresting shootouts and hand-to-hand fights, but it feels limited by its lack of resources, which turns it into a surprisingly efficient yet unfinished product. Safe House plays it safe because it knows exactly what it is, but at the same time, considering its talented cast and interesting premise, it could have been much better.

As Safe House opens, we see Agent Choi (Lewis Tan, of the Mortal Kombat reboot) riding a government car as part of a convoy in Los Angeles, heading to a meeting with the vice president. However, they are suddenly all attacked, and most of Choi’s colleagues are killed, forcing him to take the Soccer Ball, a device linked to the controls of a nuclear weapon. Knowing that he must disappear before his enemies can find him, he goes to a government safe house, where he is greeted by Anderson (Lucien Laviscount, of Emily in Paris).

There, he meets other survivors of the attack. We have Agent Owens (Hannah John-Kamen, of Thunderbolts) and her wounded partner, Reeves (Michael Bradway). There’s also an aggressive Agent Sorello (Ethan Embry) and, eventually, Agent Halton (Holt McCallany, of Mindhunter), who takes leadership of the group. At first, it seems all they have to do is wait for further instructions, but suddenly, they are informed that they are all suspects in the attack and are thus locked inside the safe house by their superiors. Aware that anyone could be the traitor, they realise they have to start working together, so they can get out of the safe house alive, and before they can be found by their mysterious enemies.

Safe House’s premise is evidently quite simple: to lock a group of diverse characters in a dangerous location so they can interact with each other, survive all kinds of dangers, and find the perpetrator of a violent attack. A premise, then, that lends itself to a low-budget film, given that there’s only one main location and few supporting characters. Considering that, Safe House manages to generate at least a bit of tension, especially when characters like Sorello become paranoid, afraid that one of his new colleagues could betray him at any moment.

Moreover, despite being a paltry ninety minutes long, Safe House is full of action. We have the opening scene, of course, which makes use of convincing explosions (and a couple not so convincing ones), as well as sudden and violent gunfights. Once inside the safe house, we have an attack by enemies entering through windows, fistfights, more gunfights, exploding bodies, grenades, and even antagonists entering through holes in the ceiling. It’s all varied enough, and while the visual effects aren’t always convincing, they’re at least not so horrific as to take the viewer out of the action. All in all, director Jamie Marshall (an assistant director and second unit director, veteran of several multi-million-dollar blockbusters) does a decent job at doing a lot with very little.

So, where does Safe House fall short? For starters, the characters never quite gel, feeling more like rough sketches than real human beings. The scenes between Owens and Anderson, for example, rely on rather ridiculous clichés about their respective pasts, making moments that should have felt emotional or at least realistic seem more like a parody. And characters like Sorello are more cartoonish than three-dimensional, fulfilling the role of comic reliefs in a rather serious story.

Additionally, despite a clear attempt at building suspense, Safe House never feels particularly exciting. Lewis Tan clearly excels in the action sequences, proving he deserves more interesting roles than this one (or the one he had in the extremely disappointing Mortal Kombat reboot). But even he can’t help Safe House build tension, with the film feeling, instead, like a somewhat lethargic and simplistic experience. Hannah John-Kamen, meanwhile, does her best with a flat role (she’s another star who deserves to be in better films), and the always convincing Holt McCallany brings some class to the proceedings.

Safe House isn’t a terrible film. Once again, it does quite a bit with what little it has, and it benefits from the presence of a talented cast, who manage to inject some energy into characters who wouldn’t read as particularly interesting in the script. But between the low level of suspense, the uneven quality of the visual effects, and the stereotypical characterisations, Safe House fails to stand out from the glut of action fare released every year. In that sense, I suppose it could be considered as the perfect DVD (or, well, streaming) experience; neither particularly offensive nor particularly clever. Again: it’s right in the middle.

Safe House will be released in select US theatres on October 31, 2025.