Chuck Russell’s thriller has two set pieces anyone would remember, a plane and a pair of rifles that see through walls, and a plot with more holes than the agency it is about. Loud, cheerful, James Caan having a fine time; not quite enough in between.
Chuck Russell made The Mask two years before this, and Eraser is the same job: a star with one enormous trick, a lot of things for him to break, and a director whose business is to keep the breaking pointed in the right direction. The star is Arnold Schwarzenegger, playing a US Marshal in the Witness Protection Program whose speciality is making people disappear. It is a loud, cheerful, competently built piece of mid-nineties action with two sequences we would show anyone, and between them a plot that cannot keep its own secrets.
The first is the plane. The Eraser jumps out of a jet with a parachute and no plan, and the jet turns round to come back for him. Adam Greenberg shoots the fall in hard daylight with the horizon tipped over, so the aeroplane fills the frame before we have worked out where it came from, and Michael Tronick cuts the pistol, the engine and the ripcord into one line we could follow at speed. Alan Silvestri’s score keeps out of the way of the engine noise. It is not possible, it does not look possible, and it works; we sat forward and forgot to be sceptical.
The second is the weapon everyone is chasing. Lee (Vanessa Williams) works at a defence contractor called Cyrez and has copied the specifications of a rail gun, a rifle that fires at close to the speed of light and comes with a scope that shows the men behind a wall as green skeletons with beating hearts. Bill Kenney’s production design gives the things weight: long, matte, ugly objects that take two hands to lift, and when a squad of them is turned on a house the house comes apart in a way we had not seen before. The red pulse inside a green ribcage is the image the film is remembered for, and it deserves to be.
James Caan plays DeGuerin, the Eraser’s mentor in the Program, as a man who has done this long enough to find it funny, and he is the most alive person on screen. He needles the younger marshals and delivers Walon Green and Tony Puryear’s gruffer lines as if he has heard them before and still likes them. Robert Pastorelli, as the mob witness Johnny C, carries the comic strand with more timing than the writing supplies. James Coburn turns up as Beller to be tall and disappointed in everyone. Williams has the harder time: Lee is written as the thing to be protected, and the script hands her a disc, a frightened employer and a good deal of running. She is composed and watchful in the gaps, and we wished there were more of them.
What the film cannot do is hold a story together between the fireworks. The Program has a leak, and the middle hour is built around who is passing information to whom, but the script tells us early and then asks the characters to spend forty minutes catching up. The ordinary gunfights, and there are a lot of them, have none of the invention of the plane: men in suits fire from behind cars, Tronick cuts on the muzzle flash, Silvestri hits the drums.
There is a sequence in a zoo, involving a reptile house and several alligators. We laughed hard at it, and at the two words Schwarzenegger delivers afterwards, and then felt slightly cheap, because the joke is built on a man being eaten and the film has done nothing to earn the lightness it wants. It is at its best when it stops pretending to be a thriller and admits it is a run of stunts with a star in the middle.
Schwarzenegger had made True Lies two years earlier, a film that knew how to joke about his size without apologising for it, and next to that Eraser is a sound job of work by a hired crew. Most critics landed about where we have, around the middle. At 115 minutes it does not outstay itself, and the 18 certificate is for the volume of blood rather than anything stranger. Watch it for the plane, stay for the skeletons, and do not try to follow the disc.
