Directed by Phillip Stölzl
Written by Arash Amel
USA, 2013
There’s a few distinct brands of action/thriller movie, and the most popular has always been “They Messed with the Wrong Man” (see also “Normal Guy becomes an Action Hero” and “Waaaarrrrr”) and Erased seems like an archetypal example. From the trailers and other advertisements, it looks like an absolutely hum-drum, boilerplate action/thriller of this mold, but there’s always hope that it’ll turn out to be one of those rare surprises that offers something new or interesting or is at least expertly made. Erased….is not one of these films.
The basic setup is this (stop me if you’ve heard this one): Aaron Ekhart plays Ben Logan, ex CIA badass now working for a company testing security systems in Brussels. Because his wife died of unspecified-itis, Ben’s also raising his tweenage daughter Amy, who’s already angry at him early in the film after he misses her (Dance recital? Music recital? Big Game? Spelling bee? Graduation?) photography exhibition (well that’s new at least). But after inexplicably bringing his daughter to his office, Ben finds the entire place cleared out and all records of his life in Europe erased, and soon finds himself and his daughter on the run from deadly assassins and uncovering a government plot.
Right from the get-go, the film does everything strictly by the books. An opening heist scene features extended shots of the robber’s feet as he walks (you don’t think you’ve seen it in every heist scene in the last ten years…but you have) and once the fight scenes break out the camera shakes and careens like Christopher Nolan and Paul Greengrass are coaching the director, Philipp Stölzl, from the sidelines (“Shake harder, damn you!”). The whole film is seemingly shot through a gray filter, with the camera constantly bobbing around and slightly out of focus, even in the non-action scenes. The soundtrack is a non-stop orgy of generic “thriller-y” music that will completely leave your head the minute you leave the theater (if not before).
While the plot does make good time in moving from point a to point b and establishing the characters, once they get established you realize’s there’s bugger-all to them. Aaron Ekhart’s a good actor, but when he’s given nothing to do but shout “Who gave the order?!?” in people’s faces it’s not surprising when nothing he does is particularly interesting or memorable. At one point you almost think the movie is going to take an interesting turn when he suddenly starts simulating drowning on some random goon and for one brief moment you think there’s going to be some statement on US foreign policy or torture tactics, but it goes unremarked upon and nothing interesting comes of it besides some gurgling noises and a slightly uncomfortable audience.
“If you look through this thing you can see someone filming a better movie!”
Liana Liberato doesn’t fare much better as daughter Amy, who does break the mold slightly by taking an active role in unraveling the mystery rather than just sitting on the sidelines screaming and getting kidnapped like most child sidekicks, but she does still do it in uninteresting ways. In one scene she actually helps her dad use a computer, because apparently the whole “adults can’t use computers” thing isn’t totally old and makes perfect sense when the adult in question is a former agent of the CIA. Olga Kurylenko also makes an appearance as a current CIA operative tasked with hunting Logan down and why YES, they do have a romantic history that she claims isn’t influencing her but actually is, how ever did you know?
There really isn’t much more to say about Erased because the film redefines boilerplate action-thriller. Everything you need to know can be said by looking at the poster: an blue-tinted image of a generically handsome blonde, white male holding a gun at an angle just under his chin, a concerned looking female over his shoulder, their heads floating over a cityscape like they’re Uatu the Watcher before his hair fell out. You couldn’t craft a more archetypal action-thriller poster, or a more archetypal action-thriller film, if you tried. But at least that would imply some effort went into this.