I feel like I have an obligation to comment on this poster since it is almost impossible walk in the city without being visually assaulted by the huge face of Denzel Washington telling me, "No one is safe".
Thanks for reminding me that I am actually walking in a city with a high crime rate and that I could possibly get mugged in the next alley.
Since putting on the poster just the giant face of Denzel Washington warning people about safety issues would be too similar to a public service announcement - which would raise questions about matters way too serious for an action movie - somebody in the graphic department thought it was a good idea to combine it with a Calvin Klein advertisement that shows how good Ryan Reynolds is at glancing behind the camera.
I would like to imagine that an intern in the company that designed this poster tried to warn coworkers about the problems of compositing both a close up and a wide shot on the same page.
And, even if this never happened, I am sadly sure somebody else came up with the idea of a split page, candidly thinking he just conceived the smartest arrangement in modern history.
Compositing a poster split in two different images is never so easy. It needs to hold an aesthetic meaning, shapes and vector lines should merge to create a geometric order that is harmonious to the eyes and the dividing line should never be too abrupt.
If interested, a good example of the union of two images is the poster for The Ides Of March.
The poster for Safe House seems to represent a hasty graphic work where the two images are put together with no logical sense or purpose beside aligning Ryan Reynolds' pubes to Denzel Washington's mouth.
And I honestly don't think it was something they were going for.
