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Ryan Reynolds stars in Safe House. + Enlarge

As in nature, February at the box office can be a cold and desolate month. It is a time at which studios generally release their titles not deemed big budget enough to draw in summer blockbuster numbers, yet not high concept enough to generate end-of-year Oscar buzz. In short, it’s generally a no man’s land.

Unfortunately, newcomer director Daniel Espinosa’s spy-centered action film Safe House, which went into wide release over the weekend, is right at home here, being entirely unoriginal in both concept and execution.

And that’s despite the formidable acting chops that get top billing. Front and center is Denzel “King Kong Ain’t Got Sh*t on Me” Washington, who, as in the unforgettable Training Day, plays the self-righteous rogue, this time ex-CIA. And he’s paired with Ryan Reynolds, whose performance in The Green Lantern may not have won him many accolades but was enough to convince both studios and audiences that he could hold a leading role. Plus, he was 2010’s Sexiest Man Alive, according to People magazine. It’s a pairing of legit talent and commercial appeal.

It just doesn’t have much more to go with it. The paint-by-numbers plot takes only the predicable turns, and fills any kind of void that could better be used for development into a chance to have some sort of scuffle. Guns, fists, cars. Whatever. As long as there’s a fight. So many that by the end, they’re actually boring.

The backdrop for this so-called action is South Africa, where rogue operative Tobin Frost (Washington) is making a living selling out the intelligence community’s biggest secrets to the highest bidder. When that work runs him afoul of the wrong sort of people, his only shot at protection is turning himself in. As he’s considered a threat to national security, the CIA takes charge and removes him to one of its in-country agency-owned facilities used for staging, called a safe house. This is where Matt Weston (Reynolds), an agent hungry for advancement, enters the picture as the keeper of said safe house.

Except it’s not safe. The folks hunting Frost track him to where he’s being detained and charge in guns blazing. Weston, as the sole survivor of the assault, takes Frost as his personal charge, and the rest of the film sees him trying to get the uncooperative Frost into the right hands.

With a little tweaking, it could have made for a better story. Frost, being both brilliant and an expert in human psychology, naturally spends all his time pushing Weston’s buttons in that cool, calm and collected way Washington has (see American Gangster). But the writing has him gunning for all the expected points: loyalty to the agency, his relationship with his girlfriend (who of course has no idea he’s CIA) and so on. Disappointingly, the most fertile psychological ground — that is, the question of why Weston is risking his life to protect a man for whom he has only contempt — is left entirely unexplored.

But, to be fair, not a lot of new ground is explored at all in this film. The villain isn’t Frost or even the people chasing him. It is, of course, the corrupt officials who want him taken in — the same people who work to disavow Weston when the safe house goes down. It is a sudden but absolutely inevitable betrayal so brazenly telegraphed from early on that it should come as no surprise to anyone (least of all Weston himself).

And it may just be that the myopic vision of the writers hamstrung the actors who bring the story to life, as the performances aren’t quite of the caliber the names would have us expect. Reynolds looks mostly hurt and naïve as he’s systematically brutalized in fistfight after fistfight. Washington, who can do good guy, bad guy or good bad guy as well as anyone on the planet, just seems an uninterested observer to pretty much everything going on. It’s pretty disappointing.

Then again, it’s February. Expecting much more will usually leave you out in the cold.

RATING: 1 star