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Safe House…
Yes, they’re never particularly safe, are they? In 2012’s Safe House, we saw Ryan Reynolds trying to find one for bad guy Denzel Washington and that didn’t work out too well for either of them, so when ex-cop and widower Robert (Christopher Eccleston) is asked about opening his house up to the proposition, when he’s clearly not over losing a witness (Christine Bottomley) who was shot in an altercation – the details of which we’re not fully party to by the end of this first episode, and the authorities only consider him because his house is isolated, but close enough to the village, you know it’s all going to go tits up.
And you know Christopher Eccleston’s in serious mode, because he’s got a beard.
And, unlike in Fortitude,
(yes, a spoiler tag for that one in case you haven’t yet seen the series)
He and his wife Katy (Marsha Thomason) allow his house to be the safe house to a family whose father, David (Jason Merrells), is in hospital because a bad man called Michael (Peter Ferdinando) beat him up after trying to kidnap their son Joe. A passerby was stabbed by the man, and later died in hospital.
Alas, in Safe House, from the same writer as Code of a Killer, you’re not safe from predictable tedium, which also came late on when it made you think that Joe had been abducted again because the camera lingered on an open front door, but no, he was just out in the field, playing with his football. So that’s all okay, then.
There’s a good cast in this, including Paterson Joseph, Sarah Smart, Nicola Stephenson and Christine Tremarco, but in the end you just knew there was going to be something that would try to serve as a cliffhanger – and the family’s son, Sam (James Burrows), who was away at University and, thus, out of the picture, was instantly tracked down by the bad man and his life put in danger as his car was smashed up.
Now, when you go to university, you’re meant to go far away, to get away from your home town, and that was the impression given here as otherwise he could also have been taken into the safe house. Clearly that wasn’t possible, so I can only presume that the bad man has an ability to teleport.
Safe House continues next Monday on ITV at 9pm, and it is available to pre-order on DVD, ahead of its release on May 25th, and click on the packshot for the full-size image.
Overall Score: 2/10
Director: James Strong
Producer: Andrew Benson
Writer: Michael Crompton
Sound: Daniel Giorgetti
Cast:
Robert: Christopher Eccleston
Mark: Paterson Joseph
Katy: Marsha Thomason
Ali: Nicola Stephenson
David: Jason Merrells
Becky: Christine Tremarco
Michael: Peter Ferdinando
Louisa: Harriet Cains
Susan: Kelly Harrison
Sam: James Burrows
Ben: Nicholas Moss
Megan: Sarah Smart
Joe: Max True
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.