Eraser (1996)

Sadly this amazing month is coming to an end, and my list of Arnold movies I need to see are getting shorter and shorter (this maybe a bad or good thing). And yes I am sorry I’ve been only coving his action movies, and the reason is because I haven’t seen his action movies. I’ve only seen his comedies, like"Jingle All the Way" and "Twins". But enough of that, I get to check out “Eraser”, which is a mix blessing. I’ll explain more after the jump.

So here is how the story goes. John ‘Eraser’ Kruger (Arnold) is an U.S Marshal whose sole job is to eliminate the identity of people under the witness protection act. He gets tangled up with Lee Cullen (Vanessa Williams, not the tennis player) who knows too much about a weapons supplier, Cyrez. They have been making a secret EM rifle for the U.S.A but is secretly selling it to a Russian Mafia. Kruger has to take care of Lee, make sure she stays alive ‘till her court appearance to make sure the evil go to jail. Here is the kicker though, some of Kruger’s coworkers are also working for Cyrez, and want her dead too.

Dual wielding EM rifles = badass.

Let me first start off with what I didn’t like. I didn’t care for the story and plot, they felt all to generic and 90’s action movies like. There wasn’t much originality besides the EM rifle, which was cool in my opinion. Secondly, Arnold was real boring in this film, he wasn’t Arnold just another generic action hero. And lastly he had very few one-liners that I enjoyed, but more on that in a bit.

I want to come back to the EM rifles, even though they are just a prop in the movie, it is some badass technology. Now the reason I bring this up is the fact that they are fairly important. These are being sold to the Ruskies, but you get to see them in action a fair amount. And the special effects with them still hold up pretty well and give out some eye candy. Sadly, the zoo scene doesn’t do such a good job. This is where crocodiles get loose and start to attack a few of the U.S Marshal. The effects used here were terrible, and made a tense moment into almost a laugh riot for me. Totally ruined the mood, but when Arnold shoots an alligator in the head and says “You’re luggage”, it brought an even bigger smile on my face

Kruger and Lee hiding out from the bad guys.

I think the movie is best at the last 30 minutes where we see a bit of the mafia kick in. They are on Kruger’s side, and not only do they help him destroy the bad guys, they bring some comedy. They only offer a small part to the movie, but are fairly entertaining. The last action sequence was good, but nothing stellar. And the final twist was a good surprise. I kind of didn’t see that coming, and it ended off the movie pretty god. But the final line of the movie is great, after the bad guys get hit by a train, Lee asks what happened and Kruger response, "They caught a train." Awesome!

To wrap it all up, I didn’t care too much about this movie while watching it. It was only really good when the end came around. So I am not too sure if I enjoyed it a whole lot, but what I can say is I won’t be wanting to see this movie ever again. And this goes to you guys too, even though this movie has some entertaining values, it isn’t a must watch.

Arnold Rating:
One-liners: Very few and nothing amazing. Maybe 3 good ones at most.
Action: Fairly generic but with a twist when the EM rifles show up. But nothing great.