So deeply embedded in its time and place, so much a part of the culture that surrounds it, so well attuned to the whispers of the Zeitgeist, cinema, in its popular incarnations, inevitably reflects the attitudes of its audience. Throughout its history the film industry, always a profit-making enterprise, has responded to the needs and desires of its public, even addressing some of their concerns. No wonder, then, that so many popular films apparently record, sometimes in imaginative ways, the political, social, even moral atmosphere in which they appear.

For years, perhaps decades, for example, in both American and foreign movies the CIA endures so negative a reputation - much of it deserved - that it serves as a useful conglomerate villain. Because of its history of destabilizing democratically elected governments, assassinating political leaders, its hysteria over Communism, and its failures in the Cold War, the organization earned a reputation as an enemy of freedom. At the same time, ironically, a number of right-wing fanatics suggested that the CIA worked to oppress American citizens and even orchestrated the Oklahoma City bombing. (Skeptics should read some of the lunacy that lights up the Internet.)

"Safe House," the latest spy thriller dealing with the organization, uses a good deal of now-familiar material, adding a few new wrinkles but concluding in a manner that actually resembles a similar work, the highly entertaining 1975 flick, "Three Days of the Condor." Ryan Reynolds plays Matt Weston, a young, low-level CIA agent in South Africa whose job consists of maintaining a safe house, a refuge for people the organization needs to protect. He spends his time monitoring instruments and confirming signals, desperately trying to move up from his boring, lonely duties and get a real assignment in an important location.

Weston's life changes drastically when a team of interrogators brings in Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington), a rogue agent targeted by a group of unknown assassins, who has surrendered to the American consulate to escape his pursuers. On the run for a decade, Frost possesses some highly sensitive information about agents in services all over the world that the CIA wants to recover; to that end they begin enhanced interrogation, i.e., torture. Sadly, before they can accomplish more than a few waterboardings, Frost's heavily armed pursuers breach the security of the safe house and all hell breaks loose.

After Frost and Weston escape the chaos, the rest of their action consists mostly of a series of fierce gunfights, vicious hand-to-hand combat, and far too many spectacular car chases. As they speed toward another safe house, the pair leave a trail of demolished automobiles, dead enemies, and buckets of blood, some of it their own. In the midst of all this the veteran Frost and the novice Weston form something of a bond, and the young man proves himself a worthy ally.

Throughout their relationship Frost instructs his companion/guard in the reality of espionage and treason, condemning the history and practices of his organization and predicting the danger that Weston will encounter from his own side. All the while, back at headquarters, Weston's immediate boss, David Barlow (Brendan Gleason) and a group of executives and technicians track the pair and search for the person who betrayed the location of the safe house, and the fact of Frost's secret information.

Denzel Washington plays Tobin Frost with an understated passivity that borders on a really irritating smugness; he often seems amused to find himself in the movie and now and then even ready to leave it. Apparently a rising star, Ryan Reynolds never attains much in the way of plausibility and in fact, in a trajectory that should display a kind of initiatory experience, actually appears to diminish in maturity.

The director employs an unusual visual pattern to tell a relatively familiar story, alternating the extraordinary number of violent events - all those pursuits, collisions, shootings, stabbings, clubbings, stranglings, etc. - with a constant series of tight close-ups of the actors' faces. He apparently believes his constant switching from face to face, moving the camera ever closer all the while, conveys and sustains the high emotional intensity of the plot, but all the grainy close-ups only underline a kind of false excess that annoys more than it excites.