‘Don’t you ever get tired of babysitting scumbags?‘
One of the things I love about cinema is that even after all these years, it is possible to stumble across some factoid or tasty morsel of trivia that blows your mind. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is not just my favourite Nightmare movie, it’s also one of my most treasured horror films generally. If you asked me who directed that masterpiece I could probably reach back into the dusty corners of my tiny mind and pull out the name Chuck Russell, but did I know that he also directed The Mask?? Absolutely not. I also didn’t know that he teamed up with another important icon from my childhood for Eraser…
Unfortunately, Eraser is not a movie about Arnie going around with a massive rubber correcting people’s mistakes, but rather a film about a Witness Protection specialist (Schwarzenegger) who becomes embroiled in a devious scheme to erm… I’m not sure really, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that it is a very cunning plan, and Arnie can’t trust anyone. He can’t trust his boss DeGuerin (James Caan), he can’t trust the woman he is protecting (Vanessa Williams), shit… he can’t even trust himself.
Eraser is interesting because it comes at the tail end of the Arnie glory years (this began a terrible trio of films for the Austrian Oak that also took in Jingle All the Way and Batman & Robin), but it also contains some of his finest acting. Schwarzenegger plays it straight pretty much throughout although he does find time to fire off a quick one-liner after shooting a massive crocodile in the mouth.
This leads us onto the fatal flaw of this movie – the pacing. That crocodile incident occurs about halfway through when it really should have been the conclusion. There is absolutely no reason for this film to be nearly two hours long and when it flags, it really does flag in a big, bad way. That being said, the unlikely appearance of Joe Viterelli as uncompromising mob boss Tony in the third act does liven things up, as does a pair of cameos from James Cromwell and John Slattery (a little treat for any Mad Men fans reading this).
Schwarzenegger does a really great job in carrying this movie, and it has perhaps been unfairly forgotten in what is an admittedly incredible oeuvre, and this is frustrating; with a little more care, this could have been a classic Arnie movie. As it is, it will have to settle for simply being a good one.