ERASER
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Caan, Vanessa Williams, Robert Pastorelli. Screenplay: Tony Puryear, Walon Green. Director: Charles Russell. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
ERASER is a strange case this summer. Here is an Arnold Schwarzenegger action film, carrying an estimated $80 million price tag, recently in entertainment headlines for last-minute digital work required to change the name of the company in the film due to a legal challenge...and hardly anyone seems to be talking about it. In a movie season where marketing has attempted to turn every subsequent blockbuster into a pop culture happening, ERASER seems to be just another supporting player; it is even sharing its release date with Disney's latest animated fiscal printing press THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME. Arnold seems to have managed the heretofore unthinkable feat of becoming unobtrusive. The result might be an absence of overly high expectations, which can only work in ERASER's favor. It's generic Schwarzeneggerian action fare which almost manages to seem quaint in its cartoonish basic-ness.
Schwarzenegger plays John Kruger, a U. S. Marshal working for the Federal Witness Protection Program whose specialty is staging the deaths of his charges to keep them safe -- hence his code name "Eraser." His latest case is Lee Cullen (Vanessa Williams), an employee at defense contractor Cyrez who has agreed to obtain proof that the company is involved in the sale of experimental weaponry on the black market. What Kruger is soon to realize is that even government officials are involved in the operation, perhaps including his own mentor Robert Deguerin (James Caan). But it is Kruger himself who is set up as a traitor, and forced to keep both himself and Lee alive. With no one he can trust except his other re-located witnesses, including mob stool pigeon Johnny Casteleone (Robert Pastorelli), Kruger must find proof of his own innocence as he tries to stop the gun-runners.
ERASER is pretty much everything you've come to expect from a Schwarzenegger action vehicle: impossible odds, explosions, predictable and groan-inducing one-liners (if you can't tell me what precedes the line "They had to catch a train," please sign up for Remedial Arnie-isms), big cool guns, and big cool Arnie firing them with abandon. Director Charles Russell (THE MASK) leaps right into the action with scarcely a breath, and for the next 100 minutes seems blissfully concerned with little else. It is as though he were saying to the audience, "I've given you a good guy and some bad guys -- you know how it's going to end, now enjoy the ride."
And in spurts, it's actually possible to do so. During one marvelously sill twenty minute stretch, Schwarzenegger leaps from a plane to catch up with a parachute he has already thrown out of it, faces down the same plane while still floating through the air, crash lands in a junkyard, appropriates a truck, races to a zoo and ends up battling with villainous Feds _and_ digitally-created alligators. In those scenes, ERASER is pure mindless fun in the best sense of the term, but those scenes are also somewhat isolated. There is a surprising grimness to much of ERASER, including two separate incidents where Kruger takes an excruciatingly long time to remove a piece of shrapnel from his flesh, and Schwarzenegger himself is overly somber in much of his performance, brooding over a Dark Past to which we are not made privy. These token attempts by Russell and his screenplay-by-committee team to make Schwarzenegger more vulnerable and human demonstrate a real misunderstanding of his appeal. Audiences come to see Schwarzenegger the super-hero, and to laugh along with his awareness of the absurd situations in his action films; he is the master of the catch phrase because they are winking distillations of those absurdities. There are far too few opportunities to laugh in ERASER, except those provided by Robert Pastorelli as the motor-mouthed wiseguy who becomes Kruger's assistant.
The irony of ERASER is that it turns its greatest asset into a weakness. In a season filled with films which seem to be playing hyped-up games of "Can You Top This?" with their visual effects and decibel levels, ERASER provides an odd familiarity -- it's just li'l ol' Arnie, playing hero and making the world safe for democracy. Unfortunately, ERASER just rests on its familiarity, providing a bland villain (Caan playing Sonny Corleone as a turn-coat G-Man), a bland heroine (Vanessa Williams running and serving up the occasional "I-am-woman-watch-me-kick-a-little-ass" bit of crowd-pleasing) and a finale which is truly anti-climactic. ERASER manages a few solidly entertaining moments, and serves up the kind of meat-and-potatoes action Schwarzenegger's fans have come to expect. It also is a film which spends a lot of time shuffling its feet, and it will be interesting to see how audiences respond to a blockbuster which seems to be saying, "Don't mind me."
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 ERASER's edges: 5.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University http://www-leland.stanford.edu
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