I really enjoyed Liam Neeson’s movie “Taken.” The story of an ex-CIA black opps agent who must use his “particular set of skills” to rescue his daughter after she is kidnapped by some very bad men, ignited Neeson’s career as an unlikely action hero and was a good time at the movies.
Apparently the makers of “Erased” thought the same thing. They’ve cast character actor Aaron Eckhart in the Neeson role and added in exotic European backdrops, a daughter, a kidnapping and “a particular set of skills,” to duplicate the formula that made “Taken” a success.
Eckhart is Ben Logan an ex-CIA agent with a specialty in security systems. These days he’s in Brussels working for a multinational corporation, looking forward to getting to know his estranged daughter Amy (Liana Liberato). Unfortunately a regular day at the office turns ugly when Ben goes to work only to find an empty space. He soon discovers that he’s been working for a shell company, and worse someone has erased all records of his existence. It also becomes clear that the same people who terminated his employment would also like to permanently terminate Ben and his daughter. Cue the intrigue.
Fans of “Taken” and even the Jason Bourne movies will feel a sense of déjà vu while watching “Erased.” The movie has strong elements of both, but unfortunately not the fun of the former or the thrills of the later. It’s a competently made but a bit of a flat line as far as excitement goes.
Eckhart tries hard to create nuance in his family man with a dark side character but that’s just one side of Ben. He’s never really believable in the action scenes—particularly the up-close-and-personal fight sequences—and is saddled with too many of the man-with-a-past clichés to make Ben really compelling. He clicks with Liberato, who plays his daughter, but the focus here is the intrigue and action, not the father and daughter story.
“Erased” is Neeson Lite or Still Bourne. It attempts to elevate the story with layers of intrigue, but in the end is undone by some obvious plotting, over-shooting in the action scenes—think Paul Greengrass on speed—and a lack of the intensity that characterized its inspirations. Best saved for VOD.
When a judgment call costs him his job as a personal security guard to the President of the United States (Aaron Eckhart), Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is reassigned to a desk job in the Treasury Department. He wants his old job back, a second chance to show he has the right stuff. He gets another crack at it when North Korean terrorists invade Washington, overtake the White House, killing POTUS’s entire security team and kidnapping the Prez. As he only man left with a gun and knowledge of the White House’s security systems, he alone must protect the future of the free world!
“Olympus Has Fallen” is about as standard as action movies get. It’s so standard that the two most presidential of actors—Aaron Eckhart and Morgan Freeman—both play the Commander in Chief. This movie has everything you expect, which, if you have low expectations—and you should—is guns, bombs and at least one character who comforts a mortally wounded man with the words, “C’mon! Hang in there!”
Imagine “Red Dawn” with fewer teenagers and a bigger body count.
And this movie is all about the body count. The first twenty minutes or so is spent on “character development,” an attempt to make stock characters—like the charming but fearless Secret Service agent—but it really begins with the audacious attack and the ensuing mayhem.
From then on it is all bash, boom, bang with a side of motive—evil North Korean mastermind Rick Yune wants to reignite the Korean civil was the U.S. interrupted—and the kind of patriotism that only ever shows up in movies like this (ie: Banning crushes a bad guy’s skull with a statue of Abraham Lincoln).
Director Antoine “Training Day” Fuqua embraces the 80s-style b-movieness of it all, liberally mixing melodrama with mano-a-mano old-school action. If you had a poster of Dolph Lundgren on your wall in 1984 or rent JCVD movies today you’ll find a kindred spirit in “Olympus Has Fallen.”
“Rabbit Hole,” the new film starring Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart and Dianne Wiest, is about what happens when the natural order of things is disrupted. Just as summer always follows spring and two plus two always equals four, some things are immutable. The sad premise that lies at the base of “Rabbit Hole,” however, is a natural law that unfortunately isn’t as absolute as the others. What happens to parents when they outlive their children?
Howie and Becca (Eckhart and Kidman) are a couple trying to deal with the death of their four-year-old son Danny. They are at different stages of their grief, but they share a couple of things; a terrible sense of loss and an inability to know how to deal with it. On the surface he wants to move on but at night secretly watches videos of the toddler. She is angry at the world, a bubbling cauldron of resentment and hurt that could boil over at any time. Healing comes slowly, and from some unexpected sources, leading up to a climax that is quiet and inconclusive yet starkly effective.
“Rabbit Hole” is the kind of film Nicole Kidman needs to make to remind us why we liked her in the first place. After nondescript performances in big budget stiffs like “Bewitched” and “The Golden Compass” it is a relief to see her sink her teeth into the role of the devastated mother. She avoids the clichés and melodrama a lesser actor might have brought to the role and delivers a masterfully subtle examination of grief and loss. The iciness that sometimes creeps into her work melts away here as she reveals her vulnerabilities.
Kidman leads the cast but fine performances abound. Eckhart connects (and disconnects when appropriate) with Kidman while Wiest hands in a beautifully modulated performance as a woman who has known much sadness in her life but has moved on. Each character in the film is flawed, yet in their own way sympathetic.
Up until this point director John Cameron Mitchell—of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and “Shortbus” fame—hasn’t been known for his restraint, but with “Rabbit Hole” he takes a melodramatic premise and reins it in until all that’s left is real human emotion. Highly recommended.
In my review of the first installment of the revived Caped Crusader franchise I wrote, “I went in to Batman Begins expecting a lot and left wanting less—less psychological babble, a lesser running time and less of Liam Neeson’s ridiculously wispy goatee.” For the new episode, The Dark Knight, director Christopher Nolan has kept most of the stuff that bugged me about the first movie (except for the wispy goatee part, which is, thankfully, is no where to be seen) but has, this time around, created a tour-de-force that left me running for my thesaurus to find new words for awesome.
Its two-and-a-half running time makes it the longest of the summer blockbusters but, unlike Get Smart or Sex and the City, there isn’t a wasted second or extraneous scene. The film takes off like a turbo charged Batmobile, opening with an exciting bank heist, and doesn’t let up until the end credits.
Following the robbery, in which $68 million dollars of the mob’s money is stolen, the triumvirate of Batman (Christian Bale), Lieutenant Jim Gordon (Gary Oldham) and District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) take a broom to the streets of Gotham in an effort to, once and for all, put an end to crime in their city. After mass arrests the crime fighting trio comes up against their greatest foe yet, The Joker (Heath Ledger), a psychopath with a sinister scar in place of a smile, who forces Batman and Dent to push the boundaries of their professional crime fighting ethics.
Since 9/11 the world has spent a great deal of time pondering good and evil, and so does The Dark Knight. It is the first true, post 9/11 superhero movie; one that looks at the use of chaos as a tool of terrorism while exploring the paper thin line between good and evil.
Dispensing with the jocularity of Iron Man, the CGI action of The Incredible Hulk and Hancock’s sense of irony, The Dark Knight is a serious film with a positively Shakespearean exploration of the ethics of good and evil that raises timely questions in these unsettled times. Mainly, to what lengths can heroes go as they fight crime before they stop being heroes and become vigilantes? When is it OK to break the rules to stop evil? Batman and Dent grapple with these questions (more than, say, Rumsfeld or Bush ever did) as the Joker pushes them closer to the edge of their moral boundaries.
The Joker’s biggest question is one for the ages. Can bad guys exist without the good guys?
“I don’t want to kill you,” the Joker tells Batman, by way of an answer. “You complete me.”
But don’t get the idea that The Dark Knight is only a treatise on the nature of villainy. It is that, but the ideas about good and evil are wrapped around a popcorn movie that is packed with great action, thrills and good performances.
Christian Bale fills out the Batsuit better this time around, skillfully portraying the moral tug of war the character plays with his conscience while ably pulling off Batman’s outrageous feats of physical prowess. Bale may be the only contemporary actor who can convincingly pull off ennui one second and then pilot a supercharged motorcycle up the side of a building the next.
New franchise addition Maggie Gyllenhaal, stepping in for Katie Holmes, brings a feistiness to the character of Bruce Wayne’s oldest friend and soul mate Rachel Dawes. Aaron Eckhart in a dual role does a nice job of playing the transformation from the virtuous DA Dent to the twisted morality of the considerably creepier Harvey-Two Face. Old pros Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, as Bruce Wayne’s trusted butler and equipment designer respectively, round out the cast, both handing in effortless performances.
Of course the cast member everyone wants to see is Heath Ledger as the Joker in his last completed performance. I always felt Batman Begins was marred by the lack of a great villain, but this time around the inclusion of Ledger’s Joker guarantees on-screen fireworks for The Dark Knight.
Whereas Jack Nicholson’s Joker was a pop culture icon for the prosperous 80s and 90s, Ledger’s Joker is a super villain for the new millennium; a terrorist, more interested in creating chaos than in anything else.
He’s a disfigured bad man—“What doesn’t kill you only makes you stranger,” he says—who when he isn’t killing people—his preferred weapon is a knife because it’s up-close-and personal—keeps busy creating elaborate schemes to test the moral fiber of the men who want to put him behind bars. Ledger strips the character of Nicholson’s cartoon persona, re-imagining him as a fiendish lunatic. From the slash of red lipstick where his mouth should be to the caked white make-up that obscures his face Ledger’s Joker is an unhinged creation that will likely inspire nightmares. It’s a bravura performance that sees the late actor working at the top of his game as he creates the definitive version of the character (sorry to any Cesar Romero fans who may disagree).
The Dark Knight is a rare beast. It’s a summer blockbuster with equal parts brain and brawn.
Given the content of the film “Battle: Los Angeles,” the new alien invader movie starring Aaron Eckhart, it’s surprising it isn’t subtitled “Marine Recruitment Movie.”
The movie begins with the hoariest of clichés, the battle weary Marine, Michael Nantz (Eckhart), thrown into the biggest fight of his life just hours after he has announced his retirement. His mission is to lead a group of soldiers against some well-armed ETs who have captured every major port city in the world. As the title suggests, his job is to save Los Angeles.
The first twenty-five minutes or so of the film is spent with the Marine characters; getting to know the folks we’re going to be spending the next two hours with. But instead of meeting believable people we are handed a roll call direct form Central Casting with dialogue that sounds like it was written by an actual G.I. Joe doll. Director Jonathan Liebesman’s relentless shakey-cam tries to distract the eye from the total lack of anything interesting going on with the characters but simply clutters the screen with jittery images.
Then things start to blow up and for the next hour-and-a-half there is a fairly constant video game barrage of bullets and bombs and dialogue like, “You kill anything that is not human!”
The movie’s pace certainly picks up from here, but the story doesn’t get much more interesting. Liebesman breaks a few of the rules regarding alien action movies. Firstly: He shows too many humans, not enough aliens. We can see humans anywhere—look out a window! Turn on the TV! Aliens, not so much. Too often in “Battle: Los Angeles” the extraterrestrials are obscured by smoke or so far in the distance it’s hard to get a good look at them.
Secondly, and this doesn’t just apply to alien invasion flicks but to all action movies, show us the action. Sure there is lots of action on screen and the soundtrack is filled with kabooms and pows, but the images are so frenetic it’s often hard to tell who is shooting who.
Lastly, all the great alien invasion movies are actually about something other than aliens. Recently, for instance, “District 9” was a potent mix of space invaders and apartheid. Any search for subtext here, however, will be met with disappointment, as “Battle: Los Angeles” simply plays like an only sporadically entertaining Marines propaganda film.
