Featuring: Aaron
Eckart, Liana Liberato, Olga Kurylenko, Eric Godon
Directed by:
Philipp Stölzl
Running time: 104
minutes
Parental Guidance:
violence, coarse language
Rating: 3 stars
out of 5
If Liam
Neeson can do it, why can’t every other actor with a jutting jaw and a
man-sized frame do the same?
It’s
not like there’s ever going to be a glut of good guys who can take down a crew
of criminals and dote on their daughters at the same time, so even if Erased
features Aaron Eckhart in the familiar role of humble family defender, there’s
no sense of exhaustion before this action thriller leaves the gate.
If
anything, the European setting and Eckhart’s decent French accent promise
something just a little more sophisticated than your standard muscle-bound
movie pummelling, even if the whole premise feels a little flimsy.
Kicking
off with a high-tech heist that leaves dozens of bodies behind, Erased doesn’t
try to soft-sell the violence or whitewash the bloodshed. When the thieves
march into the secure facility to steal a tubular lockbox, they do so with cold
precision and automatic weapons.
There
is no emotion. They are all business, and this pushes the central theme to the
very foreground as Ben Logan (Eckhart) finds himself groping with different
elements of his own reflection.
Ben
figured he was all business, too. But when his daughter becomes embroiled in a
secret operation that compromises her safety, he’s forced to knit both halves
of his fractured soul together in order to save her life.
The
first hook in the setup is the overt battle between good and evil as Ben tries
to assemble the pieces of this caper together. He knows he was hired to create
security technology for a multinational based in Brussels, but when the company
letterhead turns out to be forged and the other employees turn up dead, Ben
realizes he’s been the victim of an elaborate scam to gain access to classified
data.
You know
the drill: It’s part Jason Bourne, part Taken and part Charlie’s Angels —
because in the end, the plot doesn’t really matter. It’s about what happens to
the characters along the way as they face one extreme situation after the next.
