A Life Through Film #024: Eraser
One of action's biggest stars says goodbye to the style that made him a legend
Release Date: 6/21/1996
Weeks at Number One: 1
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!
A big part of this column as the years go on will be the emergence and death of trends in the world of popular film. We’ve seen the emergence of special effects driven adventure movies in the wake of Jurassic Park [3.5/5], which will eventually segue nicely into a disaster movie boom in the later 1990s. Hell, the long lasting effects of Toy Story alone could be its own epic series. But not every trend can last; all of them die a death eventually.
Like most other genres, action movies are extremely trend based. We’re only now seeing a downturn in the superhero subgenre, a trend so dominant it once inspired every movie journalist to ask Martin Scorsese about its merits every four months in a search for critical validation to match its commercial success. But though we will probably never be without at least one new Marvel or DC entry a year, the comic book adaptation is a far less dominant presence at the box office than it was even 5 years ago. The pattern repeats through the years; only the trends and their faces change.
We’ve already touched on this a bit when I reviewed The Quest, but for a while, the action movie of choice for many Americans followed a simple formula. In the 1980s and early 90s, many movies starred a strong, very muscular guy who would act as a one man army against myriad threats like Russians, drug dealers, or Russian drug dealers. Sylvester Stallone in the Rambo sequels, Jean-Claud Van Damme in his more mainstream movies like Timecop [2.5/5], and the few mainstream crossover moments for Steven Seagal all fit nicely into this subgenre. But of course, one action star was more muscular, more cigar chomping, and more likely to spout a one liner than the rest.
The story of Arnold Schwarzenegger is basically American folklore at this point. An Austrian muscleman who impressed with his insane physique in the early ‘80s, he was one of the biggest movie stars in the world by that decade’s end. Schwarzenegger initially worked best merely as a physical presence due to English being his second language, but the man’s so charismatic that he was able to work that into his personal narrative; he might still have one of the most iconic accents in pop culture history.
Unlike JCVD, Seagal, or even Chuck Norris, Schwarzenegger was not just a genre star. Instead, he was a true force in pop culture. Iconic turns in The Terminator [4/5] and Conan the Barbarian gave the world some of the most iconic action characters of all time and made the muscular Austrian a household name. In the years beyond, he would further install himself deeper into the general American zeitgeist. He’d marry into the closest thing we had to a royal family in the 20th century (the Kennedys) and would eventually lead the state of California as governor.
However, where we first meet the man who would later be Governator in this column is not quite at the peak of his powers. The summer of 1996 served as a bit of a turning point for both Arnie and the action subgenre he helped to popularize, which had been going strong for well over a decade at this point. Americans had spent years watching larger than life iconoclasts save the day with the pure power of physical might and a mighty arsenal of weapons by June of 1996, and they were starting to get a bit sick of it. You can see this concretely in the disappointing performance of The Quest earlier in the year. Sure, Van Damme wasn’t on the same level of a Schwarzenegger, but he had been a major draw just a couple of years prior. Now, he was barely king of the dump months.
As Van Damme floundered, Schwarzenegger seemed ready to leave these kinds of movies behind as well. He had already starred in two meta deconstructions of muscleman action films by the mid ‘90s, one of which was the major financial and critical darling True Lies [3.5/5] (the other was The Last Action Hero, a disappointment in reviews and box office returns that does have a lingering cult fandom for it). To keep dipping back into the well of ripping his shirt off and shooting away all the world’s problems seemed unnecessary at this point.
Perhaps he needed just a win. Schwarzenegger was coming off of the Danny DeVito buddy comedy Twins, which had been his worst performing film of the decade so far. Had the star ventured too far outside of his comfort zone? It’s not like he had made any straightforward dumb action movies by that point in the ‘90s: his filmography from the first half of the decade is either goofy comedies like Twins or more conceptual, dare I say even high brow fare like the aforementioned True Lies and T2: Judgement Day [5/5]. Maybe people had forgotten what Arnie had become famous for: kicking ass, shooting bad guys, and showing off that insane physique while he did it.
But wouldn’t you know it? As Schwarzenegger considered his next steps, a script literally written for him came across his desk. Arnie and the rest of Hollywood would do one last big mainstream muscleman action movie for the summer of ‘96. The explosions would sound off en masse for a final salute to a whole subgenre of action movies. And boy could their timing not have been better.
Eraser is a 1996 action movie directed by Chuck Russell and starring Schwarzenegger, Vanessa Williams, and James Caan. Arnie dominates the film as a federal Witness Security agent who’s the absolute best at making important eyewitnesses disappear into safety and obscurity. While protecting a corporate whistleblower (Williams) though, he runs afoul of a dangerous government conspiracy and must use his incredible skills to save his charge and prevent a dangerous weapon from falling into the hands of terrorists.
Schwarzenegger and Russell were planning on making another movie together when they were handed the initial script for Eraser, which came from first time screenwriter Tony Puryear. The official production notes for the movie say that Puryear wrote the screenplay with Arnie in mind, so he must have been a big fan turned hobbyist-writer and got lucky with his work (I will ideally mirror this career path at some point but with Saoirse Ronan instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger).
Russell, who had started his career in horror and had most recently directed the Jim Carrey breakout action comedy The Mask, had long yearned to make a big American action movie like what Schwarzenegger had starred in back in the 1980s. Not only did he now have the star on hand with a script ready to go, he had the financial backing to make the movie as big as possible. Ann and Arnold Kopelson were a major producing team that previously appeared in this column for trying to make Se7en a less depressing movie (they lost that fight). The Kopelsons got very invested in the making of Eraser and were able to get it picked up by Warner Brothers quickly.
As has become a recurring trend in this column over the past few weeks, an army of uncredited screenwriters were brought in to tighten up the first draft. Heavy hitters like Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption [4/5]) and William Fisher (The Terminator) reworked the script constantly, especially the film’s extended second act. The screenplay was so nebulous in nature that the film was well into filming without a firm idea of whether a given scene, moment, or story thread would even survive the next day’s draft.
Despite Schwarzenegger expecting perfection on his sets, the issues with the screenplay allegedly made the filming of Eraser a real nightmare for everyone involved. The cast and crew would be flown across the country for a scene that would later be scrapped just before filming started, causing wasted money and time day after day. Insiders split the blame between Russell and Kopelson, with both men criticized by the crew for not stepping up and giving the production a strong creative direction. Kopelson threatened to fire Russell at least once. Things didn’t get quite as violently tense as they did on the set of Twister, the first major action hit of that summer, but it doesn’t sound like a great environment for creative filmmaking.
Twister, though, was able to rise above its troubled production and release as a generational adventure thriller that revived the entire genre of mainstream disaster movies. Meanwhile, I had never heard of Eraser before adding it to the list of movies to cover for this column. And that isn’t for lack of awareness of Schwarzenegger’s ‘90s output either. I had at least heard of every major movie he had done before 1996, and even had passing knowledge of some of his turn of the millennium bombs like End of Days and The Sixth Day (I haven’t watched that one in full but saw about half of it on TV one day. Awful film). So why hasn’t Eraser lingered in the cultural mind despite its financial success?
What makes this question more interesting is that it’s not like Eraser is a terrible film. It’s not great, but it’s a generally well put together one of these kinds of movies. It has a few big stars, it touches on similar themes as other popular action films at the time, and it has lots of viscerally satisfying explosions. A better overall script may have helped with keeping people interested long term, but The Rock isn’t exactly based on a masterful screenplay and it’s still held up as Michael Bay’s best film in a lot of circles. I think there’s value in comparing the two films as representatives of a transitory moment in action films, but first let’s actually get into Eraser.
Like many of the man’s movies, Eraser is built all around Arnold Schwarzenegger as the star of the show. And to actually compliment the movie’s timing, I think this script found the Austrian at a strong point in his ability. Not only was he still able to do all of the action required of him at full capacity, but I’d make the argument that 15 years in Hollywood working with directors like James Cameron had actually made Arnie a solidly good actor.
In Eraser, his bodybuilding physique still makes Arnold an intimidating physical presence, especially when he’s dressed in the tightest shirts ever created. But on top of that, he actually nails some of the more subtle facial cues that a lesser peer like JCVD could never hope to accomplish. In the quiet moments between action set pieces, Arnold remains legitimately compelling thanks to little human touches that he frankly wouldn’t have been capable of earlier in his career. When he puts his hand on Williams’s shoulder to comfort her after she’s forced to flee her old life, you don’t actually notice that his mitt is a mass of muscles that dwarfs his co-stars entire frame. Instead, Arnie sells the humanity of the moment well, drawing us a bit closer into the narrative.
Eraser is the latest action movie in the column to tackle the theme of government spies and soldiers feeling out of place after the end of the Cold War. Instead of exploring that topic more richly like in Goldeneye or The Rock, this movie takes the Broken Arrow approach and makes these talented soldiers bored and unappreciated to the point of high treason. It’s a logical base for a villain’s motivation, and in the right movie it can be explored in a way that attempts to speak to larger topics like America’s place at the end of history.
It’s a shame, then, that the story of Eraser is so messy overall. The film has a solid concept as a foundation, but once the second act has to explore and expand on the idea of a Witness Protection agent and his most dangerous case yet, you really begin to feel the countless rewrites that were happening on set. Allegedly, the producers had multiple major set pieces rewritten or removed entirely before filming in an effort to avoid similarities with projected summer champion Mission: Impossible. The result is that Eraser feels generally disjointed before an hour has gone by.
A cabin in the middle of the woods is stormed by secret agents. Schwarzenegger gets into a shootout on a plane before jumping off of it and dangerously parachuting down to Earth. Another shootout at the reptile house at the Central Park Zoo right before a sneaky infiltration through a weapons manufacturer’s office building. By the end, Schwarzenegger is dual-wielding scifi railguns in a shootout between Russian mercenaries and the Italian Mafia. These are pulled out of context, but even in the context of watching Eraser, they don’t feel like the fun escalation of an otherwise cohesive movie. It feels like chaotic junk.
I’m all for things getting whacky in an action movie, but I need the movie to appreciate its own silliness with me. Eraser and its cast present its plot with grave seriousness for the bulk of the runtime, leading to a disjointed contrast when things get over the top. Williams and Caan are fine in their respective roles, but this is the kind of movie that screams for a more ferocious female lead or a campy villain performance. Instead, both actors play it far too safe.
It doesn’t help that when the movie does decide to get fun, it relies far too heavily on CG effects that have not aged well at all. The reptile house shootout, for example, makes liberal use of animated crocodiles that just look awful, especially considering that the same scene uses high quality animatronics for some of its other shots. The effects are legit distracting, and take me out of the experience despite Eraser’s best efforts. The result is that the movie only gets fun at the end, when the mob shows up and starts doing wise guy quips in between gunfights.
The action itself is serviceable. Russell wanted to make a big American action movie, but he clearly also has a love for Hong Kong as well. Schwarzenegger at one point does the John Woo classic: a classic slow motion dive through the air while firing a pistol in each hand. The explosions in some sequences are logically absurd but well executed. If there was a male ally for Arnie to forge a slightly homoerotic bond with through the struggle of violence, we’d have a firm entry into the Heroic Bloodshed subgenre on our hands. Not a great one, mind you; this isn’t touching Hard Boiled in terms of quality, but it’s clear that Russell had watched that movie a number of times before filming Eraser.
This is not a bad movie, but it only barely qualifies as a good movie to me. The action is fine but nothing special. Arnie is compelling in the lead but no one else really jumps out at me as having a standout performance. The story has a good foundation but meanders too much to be worth paying attention to. Overall, Eraser is firmly fine. Its Rotten Tomatoes score of 44% is maybe a bit low, but not by much.
If you just look at box office gross, Eraser should be considered a solid success. A debut at number one against a tentpole Disney feature, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, is a strong start, and it kept momentum from there. Its domestic run in theaters went about 4 months and ended with it raking in $100 million. Meanwhile, a similarly strong foreign release made the latest Schwarzenegger film nearly $250 million when all was added up. However, all of the confusion on set and constant rewrites had added up, and the production budget allegedly swelled to $100 million. This means that despite being the 14th highest grossing film of 1996, Eraser was not nearly as profitable as its peers on that chart.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name still carried enough weight to make one of his action movies do well at this point, and I do know that this movie has its fans to this day. I was recently at a wedding and a couple of friends glowingly brought it up independently of me discussing my column. But again, there weren’t a lot of big movies like this afterwards. What was changing in the action movie sphere?
Let’s compare and contrast with The Rock. That movie has a more grounded threat, a more morally complicated villain, and, importantly, was led not by a musclebound superman. Instead, a couple of (relatively) regular guys with very specific skills often found themselves out of their depth as they struggled to achieve their goal. This matched the growing trend of ‘90s action movies, with audiences more willing to watch an “everyman” struggle through interesting conflicts in lieu of an action figure brought to life beating the whole world with the power of his muscles. Eraser is the last of a bygone era of action films to hit it big at the box office, and if you don’t believe that this was the final possible moment for this movie to succeed like it did, come back in a couple of weeks for the true changing of the guard.
Was there a larger cultural reason for the shift from movies like Eraser? Maybe a more cooperative spirit at the End of History? Maybe, but I also think genre fatigue is very real. Arnie had been making beefy action films like Eraser for nearly two decades by 1996, and had already shown he could break free of their formula to incredible results. Maybe some fans found it comforting to see him return to a more bread-and-butter version of the genre, but I imagine a lot of people were just tired of this kind of movie. And Eraser wasn’t the only proof of that. Schwarzenegger’s unofficial co-leader of the genre, Sylvester Stallone, had recently dropped a couple of dud action flicks like Judge Dredd that leaned towards that ‘80s style. It was time to mix it up.
I don’t find Eraser to be a super compelling film on its own merits, but it does provide a good point of comparison for a lot of the action movies we’ll be looking at in the near future of this series. Personally, I think this one is skippable, but if you absolutely love Arnold Schwarzenegger and have somehow missed this one, Eraser is a perfectly fine example of a man doing the big budget version of returning to his roots.
Rating: 2.5/5
Next Week: A comedy icon publicizes the death of his most well-known persona in an effort to change his image and guarantee long term success. Yes, this happened twice in one summer. Gather round the table, we’re watching The Nutty Professor next week!
See you then!
-Will