Eraser
[4K/Download Code]
I’ve always been an Arnold guy. I don’t know why that is. Between him, Sly, and JCVD, he always came first. I loved the idea of the foreigner hero, which is why Arnold and JCVD always beat out Sly in my book. I love Sly (Rocky! Demolition Man! Judge Dredd!), but if he spoke with an accent, I think I’d be more endeared to him. And even though JCVD was pretty pretttyyyy foreign, he didn’t have the kind of big personality and swagger Arnold did (does?). JCVD was trying to play it cool while Arnold was more in on the joke. I can’t see JCVD and Sly having the kind of confidence Arnold does in making fun of himself. I love that about him.
And it’s that personality aspect of Arnold that I think is severely missing from Eraser. It’s not as crazy as Total Recall or Predator, but when did plot really matter in his movies? Arnold’s personality can carry a whole movie, if it has to. In Eraser, he plays some sort of cop who can “erase” people’s past. Think witness protection program type stuff. He works for the good guys, of course. But here, there’s very little he brings to the character of John Kruger. There is none of that big Arnold personality we all love to see. Even Kruger himself is already fully formed. His character has no arc. This seems like just another day on the job for him.
If that wasn’t unfortunate enough, the entire second half of this movie turns into a slapstick comedy with the character of Johnny Castleleone and his mafia friends. It’s every bad Italian mob stereotype you can think of, it hurts the tone of the movie, and really makes it lose momentum. It’s also terribly unfunny.
Eraser isn’t a bad movie, per se. The premise is fun and dumb and there are some very cool action sequences. It just managed to completely derail itself in the last hour instead of just cutting its losses and ending the movie 30 minutes earlier. What gives!
