Eraser, 1996.
Directed by Chuck Russell.
Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Vanessa Williams, James Caan, James Coburn, Mark Rolston, Joe Viterelli, James Cromwell.
SYNOPSIS:
A witness protection specialist becomes suspicious of his co-workers when dealing with a case involving high-tech weapons.
The mid 1990s were something of a mixed bag for Arnold Schwarzenegger, as on the one hand he was still the world’s biggest movie star whose name on a poster could sell a film way in advance of it being released but, on the other, nothing lasts forever and by the time Eraser came along in 1996 it was clear that the peak days of Total Recall and Terminator 2 were very much in the past.
Which makes Eraser something of a turning point for Schwarzenegger and the action movie in general. After T2 Arnie made the bold move towards a meta-action comedy with Last Action Hero, a movie that was way ahead of its time and should have come a lot later in his career (possibly just before he went into politics in the early 2000s?), before course-correcting with James Cameron’s True Lies in 1994. Then there was Junior, another attempt at comedy that might have seemed like a good idea on paper but after the consistency of his 1980s output up to T2, things were starting to look a little shaky.
It wasn’t all Arnie’s fault, as the culture was shifting and ultra-violent muscle-bound-killing-machine-style action romps like Commando, Predator and Stallone’s Rambo movies were falling out of commercial favour with the tone shifting towards slicker, thriller-style plots with more everyman-type lead characters. Yes, you might love Die Hard but it was partly responsible for this stylistic shift towards making the heroes bleed and be in touch with their emotions.
Anyway, in 1996 we got Eraser, which served as a last gasp of the old-style Arnie movie and at the same time pointed the way forward for how the actor would fill out the rest of the decade. It was also the final Arnie-headlining movie that could be considered a critical and commercial hit in theatres that decade, because after this you got Jingle All the Way, Batman and Robin and End of Days (with a break for heart surgery in between), so the writing was definitely on the wall for the actor’s bankable status.
In Eraser, Arnie plays John Kruger, a US Marshal who specialises in ‘erasing’ witnesses as part of the witness protection programme. Kruger is assigned the case of Lee Cullen (Vanessa Williams), an employee at Cyrez, a huge multinational company who are financing a new kind of electromagnetic rail gun to sell on the black market. Cullen has agreed to download the weapon specs onto a disc to give to the FBI, but she is caught in the act by Cyrez President William Donahue (James Cromwell), who warns her that the whole operation is bigger than just Cyrez before pulling a gun on her and then shooting himself.
After initially refusing protection from Kruger, Cullen becomes a target after it is discovered she has a copy of the disc, forcing the Under Secretary of Defence to send in mercenaries to retrieve it. With Kruger now protecting her, he discovers that there is a leak from inside his organisation, that leak being his old mentor Robert DeGuerin (James Cann) who is set to make billions from black market arms sales. DeGuerin frames Kruger for the murder of several witnesses and forces him and Cullen to become fugitives, but wiping out lives is Kruger’s speciality and he is coming for his rogue colleague.
A little bit higher concept than many of Schwarzenegger’s previous movies, Eraser is a lot of fun as Arnie still looks hard as nails and gets to brandish huge guns and blow things up, while James Caan does that likeable bad guy performance that he made his own during this period, being tough when pushed by his crew and overdoing the eye rolls and facial expressions when quizzed by his superiors. The plot feels very much of its time – as electromagnetic weapons and burned CDs had replaced microfilms and secret plans as thriller movie MacGuffins – and Chuck Russell’s energetic but smooth direction gives the movie a nice even pace (is it a coincidence that the main character is called Kruger, seeing as who the director is?).
However, in trying to advance the action thriller beyond big men shooting big guns you get Vanessa Williams thrown in as the victim-cum-heroine. She is fine in the role but – despite what the producers say in the special features – there isn’t much chemistry between her and Arnie, and there is an obvious softening of his screen persona to try and accommodate that on-screen relationship. Thankfully the filmmakers didn’t go for a full-on romance so the movie just about gets away with it, but it is noticeable, especially when you consider this is coming off the back of True Lies where he sizzled with Jamie Lee Curtis.
There is the argument that Eraser could have starred anybody in the lead and you’d probably get a similar movie, as the one-liners are hardly Arnie’s most memorable and the core idea of an enforcement officer protecting a witness is fairly routine, but seeing Arnie wielding huge weapons of any kind is always a visual treat, and Eraser has a lot of visual treats as there is a lot of ‘90s CGI on display. To be fair, it hasn’t aged that badly considering how naff a lot of effects movies from the time now look, and the likes of Mission: Impossible have taken the hero-hanging-off-the-plane thing and perfected it (by Tom Cruise actually doing it), but when put in the context of 1996 the CGI alligators aren’t that bad; not Jurassic Park levels, granted, but serviceable and there have been worse examples since.
Coming backed with a couple of short featurettes about Arnold Schwarzenegger and the ‘90s action movie, this 4K UHD upgrade looks excellent, the image being crisp and clean without losing any grain. The levels of detail are superb, skin tones are natural and when the action kicks off with the rail gun’s lighting up and firing neon bullets it all looks spectacular, and yes, there is the curse of UHD on some of the green screen effects – like Arnie parachuting out of a plane – but what can you do? It’s a 30-year-old movie and you can only tidy it up so much.
Overall, Eraser is something of an underappreciated gem in Arnie’s catalogue, often getting lost between the popular highs of T2 and Total Recall, and the notable lows of Batman & Robin and End of Days. Yes, it is a bit silly but Arnie’s still-massive screen persona and the strong supporting cast – James Caan and James Coburn in the same movie? We were truly spoilt back then – lift the material above what it could have been with lesser names attached, and Chuck Russell proved that he could handle big action set pieces without losing plot momentum. It isn’t a top-tier Arnie movie, but it probably hangs around at the top of the second tier if you were to rank them, and for blockbuster entertainment value it stands way above any Terminator sequel after T2, so if you are in the mood for some solid Schwarzenegger action but don’t fancy re-watching the classics for the hundredth time, Eraser holds that sweet spot.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
