"Do I make you nervous?"

That's a renegade assassin named Tobin Frost speaking, but it could also be the man who plays him, Denzel Washington. Washington is an actor who doesn't mess around and, as an ex-CIA agent who betrays his former comrades, he's the quietly ticking time bomb at the center of an explosive thriller.

A legendary psychological operative until he went rogue, Frost has been off the radar for several years when he abruptly surrenders at the U.S. Embassy in Cape Town, South Africa. The agency brass (including Sam Shepard, Brendan Gleeson and Vera Farmiga) order an interrogation team to waterboard the defector at a safe house manned by rookie agent Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds).

Weston is hoping for a promotion so he can marry the French girlfriend who thinks he's an aid worker, so he stifles his horror at the brutal means of extracting a confession from the presumed traitor. But the feds aren't the only ones targeting Frost, and, when the smoke clears, Weston finds himself on the run with his cunning captive.

Fugitive movies are a dime a dozen, but "Safe House" is in good hands. As the jittery novice crime fighter and the poker-face professional killer, Reynolds and Washington have a fire-and-ice chemistry, and director Daniel Espinosa's shaky-cam technique is an effective expression of the volatility.

A shootout at a crowded World Cup soccer match is a particularly vivid use of the South African setting, while a horrific fist fight in a kitchen strewn with shattered glass is reminiscent of a scene in Alfred Hitchcock's "Torn Curtain." Yet the action is contained within a coherent dramatic structure and the puzzle-box paranoia of spy-agency protocol.

While other stars of his generation stoop to self-parody, Washington stands tall. We cannot tell a lie: Yes, he makes us nervous, but in a good way.

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"Safe House"

Three and a half stars (out of four) • Rating R • Run time 1:54 • Content Strong violence throughout