Safe House

Safe House

Patrick Stewart stars in Safe House as a wealthy, paranoid widower who claims to have been a government assassin under deep cover as a mild-mannered executive. His frustrated, skeptical daughter wants to put him in an institution, he's convinced that he's the subject of a government hit squad, and, to make things even more complicated, he could very well be suffering the early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. And then there's the matter of Stewart's new caretaker (Kimberly Williams), who, predictably enough, may or may not be what she appears to be. Safe House has an intriguingly paranoid, jittery premise, but instead of trusting his story, co-screenwriter and director Eric Steven Stahl sabotages the film by piling on plot contrivance after plot contrivance until it's difficult to invest any sort of emotional energy in Stewart's character or his plight. The idea that the mentally shaky Stewart is the victim of a government hit squad is disconcerting enough to begin with, but Stahl for some reason felt the need to include an additional threat, or fake threat, in the form of a playful pool cleaner whose random "drills"—during which he sneaks into Stewart's home and pretends to try to kill him—are impossible to tell apart from the actual threats on his life. The film might have worked better had Stahl found a consistent tone for the material, but instead, Safe House clumsily shifts from sitcom-esque banter between nutty old Stewart and his sassy, practical caretaker to light-hearted spy spoofery, to misguided attempts at pathos derived from Stewart's declining mental condition. Further damaging to the film's already-shaky integrity is its treatment of mental illness. Stewart's mental condition rises and falls according to the demands of the plot, which makes its depiction of Alzheimer's disease seem like nothing more than a cheap and manipulative attempt to inject some sort of gravity into an otherwise featherweight film.

 
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