http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x10drib_southwood-norsemytho-group-movie-review-classified-data_news#.UakEn9LIZn8 Erased 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?

1. Southwood Norsemytho Group
Movie Review, Classified Data Scam
Unlike Taken franchise, Erased weaves political threads
with family drama

2. Erased
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

3. 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.

4. 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.
This demands good acting and empathy, and while Eckhart may lack the same
hound dog expression and pathos-laden eyes of Neeson, he nonetheless makes
you believe he’s a committed father desperate to keep his family safe.
He’s also convincingly dangerous.

5. Eckhart’s cold blue eyes, sturdy, unsuspecting frame and his chiselled, pointy Doberman features
stir a sense of murky mystery that fit the role particularly well and add extra juice to some rather
overcooked scenes.
For instance, when young Amy (Liana Liberato) starts to see her father as a man of action, she
asks all the expected questions, such as “Why do you know how to use a gun so well?” and
“What do you really do for a living, anyway?”
Her reaction has to be one of respectful surprise as well as betrayal, and thanks to Eckhart’s
ambiguity, Amy may as well be staring Granny in the face declaring: “My, what big teeth you
have!”
The Red Riding Hood meets the Big Bad Wolf routine goes a long way in this movie because it
explores different forms of violence, and the resulting effect.
We have the emotional violence of the father-daughter betrayal and redemption, the graphic
violence of the action sequences, and the social violence of a corporate world that feeds on
human souls without remorse.
Eckhart’s character can handle all these toxic cauldrons because we eventually learn he’s a
product of the same poison factory. Trained to kill and well versed in torture, Ben Logan violated
every notion of morality for his country, and now he’s forced to reconcile the professional deeds
with his personal life — and it’s not easy.

6. His daughter looks at him with quiet loathing as he attempts to justify his actions, and this actually
makes Erased a little bit deeper than Neeson’s Taken franchise because it forces the “man of
action” to be accountable at a moral level.
Amy questions the whole equation that puts corporate power and profit above the basic safety of
human beings, and it brings texture to the prefab plot because this latent conscience seeps into
every scene.
Whether it’s the suggestion of a budding romance between Amy and a young Arab kid, or the
irony of our fugitive G-man hiding out with a group of “illegal foreign workers,” director Philipp
Stölzl sews a few flagrantly political threads into this flak jacket of a movie, bringing some
unexpected colour to what’s generally olive drab and uniform.
CAPSULE REVIEW: Erased – When an American security specialist discovers the company he was
working for was a sham, he’s forced to go under cover in order to clear his name, rescue his
daughter and regain his identity. What makes this European-shot thriller a little bit different from
Taken or Bourne is the acknowledgement of the larger moral picture, and how each character is
either damned or redeemed by their actions vis-à-vis the corporate establishment.
Aaron Eckhart stars as the conflicted American agent, and Liana Liberato stars as his tormented
daughter. Rating; Three stars out of five.