Arnold Schwarzenegger is 49 and still conquering. Undaunted, ANDREW WORSDALE tackles his new film, Eraser
AS a child growing up in Graz, Austria, Arnold Schwarzenegger was encouraged by his father to become a soccer player. Soon enough, however, the teenager discovered that his true passion was weight-lifting. Five years later, at the already bulging age of 20, he became Mr Universe — his first of what would be an unprecedented 13 titles.
He didn’t have to wait long for his first taste of film stardom, either. He was cast in George Butler’s ground-breaking 1976 body-building documentary, Pumping Iron. It is such quirky gems as Schwarzenegger taking ballet lessons to improve his posing style that broke new ground for the film in its mission to reduce prejudice against musclemen. The very next year he earned himself a Golden Globe as Best Newcomer for repeating the role in Bob Rafelson’s Stay Hungry, playing opposite Sally Field and Jeff Bridges.
Twenty years later, both of these “good” actors are struggling to resurrect their one-time golden careers while the apparently witless Arnie somehow manages to maintain his superstardom. And he remains a veritable force in Hollywood and, as a result, features heavily in America’s political and economic landscape. His has been a carefully managed career, reflecting an eagerness to both adapt to and conquer the American way of life. Becoming a naturalised US citizen in 1983, Schwarzenegger not only endorsed George Bush’s campaign for re-election, but also promoted himself into the ranks of US royalty with his 1986 marriage to Kennedy clan member Maria Shriver.
His initial success in the sword and sorcery sagas Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer (each of which earned over R450-million worldwide) led to the trademark Arnie image — a thick Austrian accent coupled with a physique that defies imagination.
And so, by 1991, after Terminator I and II, Predator, Commando, Raw Deal, The Running Man and Red Heat, Schwarzenegger had single-handedly killed more than 300 people onscreen in movies that have grossed over R4,5-billion worldwide.
Then, careful not to neglect his sweet side, he eased up on the macho persona with a stab at comedies. Twins teamed him opposite Danny De Vito as ridiculously mis-matched siblings, Kindergarten Cop had him teaching eight year olds while on an undercover investigation and in Junior he lampooned his physique by becoming pregnant.
The lighter face of Arnie also bled into his action movies — we’ve seen him as a movie character who leaps off the screen in The Last Action Hero and as the happily married naive hubby who turns out to be an incarnation of James Bond in True Lies. In the last seven years, with his tongue firmly in his cheek, Arnold has succeeded in having his cake and gleefully smashing it into his own face at the same time.
Unfortunately the same can’t be said for his latest film, Eraser — a return to the stiff, paranoid, straight-faced actioners he did early in his career. He plays Marshal Kruger, the Star Elite Federal Marshal assigned to the Federal Witness Protection Program, who, when a witness is at risk, saves her and eliminates all evidence of her existence — hence the title and the standard marketable presence of a pithy one-liner, in this case: “You have been erased.”
He steps into the action in order to protect Lee Cullen (surprisingly well-played by pop singer and scandalised ex-Miss USA Vanessa Williams), a spunky worker for a leading defence contractor who contacts the FBI after she unwittingly uncovers a scheme to export the world’s most advanced super-weapon — a kind of heat-seeking, hand-held mega-machine-gun — – into the hands of some foreign terrorists intent on shifting world power. It goes without saying that the baddies are Russian.
What starts off as a powerfully tense and intelligent thriller with a healthy dose of high- tech turns into a predictable and uninspired action adventure of the common or garden variety. The only thing preventing a straight-to-video release is the presence of the megastar himself — and a budget that went over by R135-million for a shoot that ran three months behind schedule. In other words: this movie had better make money.
One of its problems is that the script gives the game away too quickly, revealing the identity of the double-crosser within the first 20 minutes. After that all we have left is to wait for everything to be tidied up, which proceeds to take Arnie 95 or so minutes to do. Make no mistake, there’s some neat derring-do which includes our action-hero falling out of a jet-liner with a failed parachute, but overall the antics are uninspired and the showdown at the zoo is ludicrously dated for such an action sequence. After all, this is supposed to be a 1996 blockbuster.
What’s more, the script battles with itself; there are few one-liners, and these are just plain constrained (when he dispatches an angry alligator Arnold’s struggling quip is “You’re luggage” when it could’ve been, “You’re a handbag”). And so everything becomes laboured and too pat, you’ve seen it all before. A 20-minute climax at the docks set amid tankers and cranes bearing deadly freight makes it seem like they rented the location which Barbwire in turn rented from Die Hard with a Vengeance. Not to mention the final head-on battle on a huge swinging crate hovering above a ship on the bay with the actors behind the type of blue screen you’d imagine went out of film fashion with Hitchcock. And, despite the presence of two great 1970s stars, James Coburn and James Caan, with a nod to the conspiracy-style thriller it attempts to evoke, the plottting, character, wit and dialogue aren’t a patch on those two actors’ greatest thrillers: Our Man Flint and Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite.
Eraser’s greatest asset and its greatest liability is Arnie himself. The man has always worked best as an outrageous outsider, somebody who’s more than human, like Michael Jackson — an artificially generated phenomenon.
And so he works in science-fiction or fantasy material (he did a fabulous cyborg in Total Recall and a wonderful mediaeval Rambo in the Conan movies). But here we are required to believe he’s an ordinary, though elite, federal marshall — your basic sheriff, like Bruce Willis, with a badge. With his klunky voice delivering badly scripted dialogue and the mammoth frame merely meting out the usual punishment to “ditto” suspects, there are less than few surprises.
Eraser fails to cut the Arnie mustard, and soon becomes a crushing bore. Still, the brainless audience lapped it up the night I saw it, and God knows, it’s bound to clean up in the Far East and on the video-shelf. Because, on the eve of his half- century, Austria’s Mr Universe is still precisely that: in control of the world.