Eraser (18, selected cinemas)
Give us a clue
Mark Steyn
In the mood for a summer blockbuster, I arranged to meet my ex-wife — a black stripper with a heart of gold — outside the piranha house at the zoo, a favourite watering hole of ours. Despite the fero- cious twister tearing up the Hanger Lane gyratory system and the alien invasion force that had taken over the car-park, not to mention being kept late at the office to hack into the CIA computer, I skidded up onto the pavement just in time to see her buying a posy from a wizened old flower- seller, whom I instantly recognised as a 7 ft 2 inch ex-KGB psychopath. `N000000r I shouted, cartwheeling over to my ex- and snatching the flowers. `Go go go go go!!' I yelled at some nearby go-go dancers, toss- ing the lethal bouquet over the street, where it exploded among some innocent bystanders, mainly from less fashionable ethnic minorities.
The blast catapulted us across the zoo, and, as I shook the shards of glass from my singlet, I was surprised to see an embit- tered colleague from The Spectator. 'Sur- prised?' he said, bitterly, pressing his Uzi into my wife's neck. So he was the one Who'd been leaking my reviews to the other side (The New Statesman). 'Oh, please,' he said. `Spare me the lecture about good and evil and the fate of the free world. Thirty Years of service and then they reassign you to a desk job ...' He fired, but, luckily, he'd stolen my secret backward-firing gun. The glass behind him shattered and the piranha- Infested water came spilling out, though, fortunately, they devoured only him. 'The fish disagreed with him,' I remarked wryly,
having been up all night practising the line in front of the mirror. `How come,' said my ex-wife, 'you can save the world but you couldn't save our marriage?'
When we got into the movie, it seemed to be a precis of all the other summer block- busters we'd seen in the last two months. Indeed, if Mission: Impossible failed to make any sense to you, you could look on Eraser as the world's fastest remake, since its plot, its characters and its big set-pieces are exactly the same, Arnold Schwarzenegger is the Eraser, which is, I think, what the British call a rubber, unless that means a condom, which funnily enough is always what Arnie's acting reminds me of — one of those giant anthropomorphised condoms you get in public sbrvice announcements on Scandina- vian TV. 'Yuff chost bin erased,' he tells his clients in the Witness Protection Pro- gramme, informing them that he's now eliminated any trace of their individual iden- tities, their past, their personalities. This is a pleasingly post-modem concept for a sum- mer blockbuster, since most of these movies routinely eliminate any individual identity in their characters anyway. They're as engaging as the fellows who play them, and, happily, Arnie and director Charles Russell have a better cast than Mission: Impossible. As the wise old agency chief, there's James Coburn, who only has two lines in the whole picture, one of which is 'Thank you, John' but which he manages to imbue with almost Aeschylean weight. As the embittered operative gone bad, there's James Caan, one of the most compulsive film actors but here coasting through the movie on a visual tic — a twitchy shifting of his neck in his collar. Either he's about to sell out his country or he's got Tourette's Syndrome. Caan and Arnie and Vanessa Williams do all the things Tom Cruise and co. did in Mission: Impossible, like covertly download computer discs in a frantic race against time at a top-secret facility. I can hardly remember what people did in movies before they had computer discs to down- load. (Tap dance?) Instead of arranging to rendezvous by an aquarium at a Prague restaurant, they arrange to rendezvous by an aquarium in Central Park. In both cases, naturally, the glass gets blown out. As the killer alligators escape, Arnie says, 'You're luggage!', and shoots one. His other one- liner comes when some villains get run over by an express: 'They had to catch a train,' he says. There's something sweetly endear- ing about the laboured drollery: Arnie has become the Noel Coward of speak-your- weight machines.
As to what it all means, who can say? The film winds up on the docks at Balti- more, from where apparently the Russian Mafia are shipping nuclear technology to gangster states. If that sounds pretty far- fetched, all I can say is that I've had a small container of personal effects sitting on the dock at Baltimore for about a month now, and that's a more plausible excuse than any I've had from the shipping company.
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