Starring: Aaron Eckhart, Liana Liberato, Olga Kurylenko
You may like this if you liked: The Bourne Trilogy (2002 – 2007), The Cold Light of Day (Mabrouk El Mechri, 2012), Unknown (Jaume Collet-Serra, 2011)
Why so serious Aaron? This poster shows our protagonist looking into the distance intently and in others he is holding a gun. Yes, you guessed it; it is another Bourne/Taken wannabe that in this case appears to be funded by the Belgian tourist industry. Eckhart plays Ben Logan who lives in Antwerp with his sulky teenage daughter (Liberato) working for a low key security firm. Oh, and yes you guessed it: He is an ex CIA agent. The two of them are then forced on the run from nasty generic European hit men as his company suddenly has every employee killed and all records erased. Now, with his daughter in tow he must run for his life (through some very picturesque Belgian locations) while trying to get to the bottom of, yes you guessed it, a CIA conspiracy. This involves Logan’s ex colleague Anna Brandt (Kurylenko) just to add to the ‘plot’.
Oh dear, well as this is straight to DVD malarkey the initial signs are not good, despite the ever dependable Eckhart in the lead role. Well this is as generic as they come and those behind it were obviously given a checklist of what needs to go in an action thriller. So we have car chases, fisticuffs, shady CIA officers, even shadier Government officials, conspiracies, paranoia, nasty European henchman and lots of city centre locations. That is all well and good, but the story is very basic and hard to particularly care about.
The ‘action’ itself is surprisingly dull with no intensity whatsoever. The editing is horrendously bad which certainly does not help. Eckhart is absolutely fine in the role but given such poor material, this is one extremely boring and underwhelming experience. Ok, so it is just about watchable, but when there are so many better substitutes in an already overstuffed genre, then it is best to ignore this and look elsewhere.
4/10
Eh, I wasn’t fond of the movies you compared it to, I doubt I’d like this one.
Then you definitely will not like this as it badly wants to be these movies, but is actually more boring.