For some inexplicable reason, director Chuck Russell's Eraser is unusually interested in presenting Arnold Schwarzenegger in ways that are incongruous to the star's, by now long-established, screen image. Unfortunately this disharmony has nothing to do with the kind of character or emotional wavelength Schwarzenegger is being expected to play. John Kruger is not a stretch for the actor, the character an only lightly evolved version of the cyborg bodyguard seen in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Rather than stand between James Cameron's futuristic Christ and incoming bullets, this T-800 has been assigned (programmed?) to protect Vanessa Williams' Lee Cullen, a senior executive at a weapons manufacturer who has snooped too deeply into her company's extra-legal affairs and caught the attention of a government hit squad. Russell has woven a different kind of friction into Eraser then, one specifically to do with the outrageous physical feats being mapped onto Arnold's forty nine year old body.
The film's opening action sequence sees Schwarzenegger entering a blown FBI safehouse to rescue a former charge from an army of prowling mobsters. In the melee, a masked Kruger delivers an unusually high roundhouse kick to the shoulder of a snacking assassin before using a refrigerator door to twist the stunned man's skull away from his neck. Spine snapping may be standard for this era of tape cinema but the spin-kick that stuns the heavy comes off as lightly comical, especially given that this too-athletic turning strike follows a gormless close-up of Schwarzenegger's face bursting out of a black balaclava. Doubling isn't anything new for an action star like Schwarzenegger - True Lies from the previous year is riddled with physically smaller men hurtling around in cranium expanding wigs - but Russell's application is the first time where it begins to feel deliberately farcical, as if the director is sending up the limping machismo of his ageing hero.
A later sequence in which Kruger pirouettes off a docking crane then drops thirty feet onto a group of gangsters isn't just laughable though, it's risible. The feat completely at odds with a persona built around unusually cunning musculature. With Schwarzenegger seemingly being boxed off to the knacker's yard, it falls to James Caan as treacherous US Marshal Robert DeGuerin to generate the film's stranger, but much more memorable, situations. A hostage rescue sequence in which DeGuerin shows his true colours - while Schwarzenegger is busy using an enormous knife to pin creeping stunt players to hardwood doors - has a surprising level of cruelty to it. After executing a bewildered (and obviously conspiratorial) kidnapper, DeGuerin embraces the heavy's sobbing captive. While soothing the shattered woman with baby talk, his hand inches towards the pistol held by the man DeGuerin has just shot. The Marshal seizes the death-gripped side arm then thrusts it up into the lady's chest, blasting a hole through her.
While the hostage chokes and drowns on her own blood, DeGuerin begins miming his way through a CPR routine; pinching the dying woman's nose, to obstruct her dying gasps, while blowing uselessly on her cheek. His eyes dart to the nearest doorframe, willing it to be filled by some clueless rookie who can then go on to corroborate his version of events. The impressive thing about this sequence, in an otherwise rote action extravaganza, is that Caan is unafraid to be seen as truly vile in these moments. His demeanour is scurrying and venal as he powers through a charade that is both opportunistic and breathtakingly callous. The gurgling hostage is treated as a prop in DeGuerin's collapsing fiction. She is physically manipulated, in her death throes, by a man who has killed her for his own immediate (but hardly far-reaching) benefit. Caan doesn't shy away from the rape subtext in this scene either - the actor doesn't attempt to play this sequence in ways that are clinical or expert, he slobbers all over his victim, twisting and turning her in ways so obviously objectionable that the British film censor hacked the sequence to pieces for the film's UK release.
