How Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ‘Eraser’ Marked the Death of 80s Action

How Arnold Schwarzenegger's ‘Eraser’ Marked the Death of 80s Action

Eraser, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this month, is a classic Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick. He plays U.S. Marshal John “The Eraser” Kruger, the guy who gets called in when a federal witness simply has way too many assassins crawling around them and needs to disappear in a hurry. But there’s a mole within the Marshals service, and Kruger has to go on the run from his former mentor with an extremely high-risk witness (Vanessa Williams) so she can testify against a defense contractor selling experimental weaponry on the black market. There’s a plane crash and a shootout in the middle of a zoo, plus several scenes of high-tech gobbledygook designed to explain why Arnold is suddenly hacking into mainframes and dual-wielding laser canons. Basically, Eraser was the perfect vehicle to carry Schwarzenegger’s 80s action hero persona through a new decade and into a new millennium. The problem is, as suddenly as Arnold found himself snapping computers and hacking necks in a thriller about digital espionage,

audiences just as suddenly seemed to stop caring. So, what happened? In order to answer that question, we must first travel back to the beginning. There was a period throughout most of the 1980s and part of the 1990s when some of the biggest movies in the world were blockbuster action vehicles starring a handful of musclebound superstars. Annual “best of the box office” lists were regularly topped by the latest Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone movie, and sometimes the new Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, and very occasionally the new Steven Seagal movie. There were some Chucks Norris and some Brians Bosworth in the mix too, but for the most part, this brass ring was the exclusive domain of these dudes. If we’re being honest, it was the domain of two of these dudes: Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the godfathers of 80s action movies.

Eraser (1996) Biography, Plot, Development, Writing, Filming, Box office, Scene.

The basic formula to most of these films is simple – an impossible metahuman beefcake with a fanciful name (like Commando’s John Matrix or Cobra’s Marion Cobretti) is tasked with becoming a one-man army to mow down a legion of adversaries. Because this was the 80s and 90s, the adversaries were usually vaguely defined extremists, like drug-dealing revolutionaries, or drug-dealing Satanists. Also, the beefcake frequently tasks himself with this mission. Escapism of the time was partially a reaction to fearmongering reports of rampant crime waves spreading throughout the country, so watching an everyman like Charles Bronson pick up a gun in a spiraling and improbable number of Death Wish sequels to dispense some street justice was a popular fantasy. Granted,

Schwarzenegger and Stallone don’t come anywhere close to meeting a conventional definition of the word “everyman,” but that’s where the street justice fantasy bled over into our abiding fascination with superheroes, which you may have noticed has continued to this day albeit in a slightly different iteration. The bottom line is audiences enjoyed paying money to watch yoked avatars of vengeance lay absolute waste to scores of loosely defined bad guys using an arsenal of military grade weaponry and entirely too many explosions. (Paradoxically, there has never been an agreed-upon metric to grade the number of explosions in a given film; the industry rule of thumb has long been a blanket assumption that your movie needs more booms regardless of any genre or budgetary concerns.)

There’s no denying Stallone had the market pretty well cornered at the beginning of the 80s. With not one but two bonafide action franchises to his name between Rocky and Rambo, Stallone was free to crank out truly unhinged gems like Over the Top, Cobra, and Tango & Cash to fuel his fascinating ego. Schwarzenegger was mostly churning away in the background, gradually building his resume with films like The Terminator, Commando, Predator, and The Running Man, before finally obliterating all the strong dude competition forevermore with Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991. The “beefcake action picture” continued to evolve during the first half of the 1990s, with Stallone and Schwarzenegger each enjoying substantial hits in addition to Terminator 2 such as Cliffhanger, The Specialist, and True Lies. Van Damme hung in there as well with career-high successes like Timecop and Universal Soldier.

Even Seagal had something to add with Under Siege, both his biggest financial success and the only good film he has ever made. But the status of the one-man army action movie as a reliable hit began to wane right around the midpoint of the decade. It’s as if 80s action heroes had a firm expiration date in 1995/1996 that was clearly visible to everyone but the action heroes themselves. Stallone churned out two high-profile duds in 1995 with Judge Dredd and Assassins, even though those are two films that I have spent more time with than most of my extended family. These accompanied a stronger shift into comedy and drama, a move Stallone had been trying to finagle ever since the release of the original Rocky. (Stallone has stated in interviews that he became an action star somewhat accidentally.) He’d already begun the decade with a number of ill-advised comedies like Oscar and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot,

so it wasn’t unusual when he also began expanding into dramatic roles that depended less on his physicality in films like Copland. He’d actively been trying to pivot away from action for several years already, so it seemed like he was better situated to weather the impending backlash against 80s action heroes. Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, had just become the undisputed king of action movies thanks to the back-to-back megahits Terminator 2 and True Lies from his frequent collaborator James Cameron. He’d obviously been a contender ever since 1982’s Conan the Barbarian, but the first half of the 90s dropped Arnie square in the middle of two of the top-grossing movies of all time. Hanging up his action hero persona just when it was really starting to pay off wouldn’t have made a cigar-chomping lick of sense. And while 1993’s Last Action Hero was the first high-profile bomb of his

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career, the actual beginning of the end wouldn’t come until three years later, when Chuck Russell’s Eraser hit theaters in the summer of 1996. Made on an enormous budget of $100 million back when that was a reasonably optimistic price tag for an original action thriller, Eraser netted a cool quarter-billion in profits; not the kind of numbers that set box office records in 2021, but a perfectly acceptable hit for 1996. But it was the last time this particular formula, which had been distilled into its purest form in the crucible of the 1980s, proved to be successful. In fact, if we’re being perfectly honest, Eraser was barely a hit. So, what happened? What went wrong? Is there some secret locked within Eraser’s transcendent 120-minute runtime that explains why audiences abruptly soured on the one-man army action picture?

Well, the short answer is no, there isn’t. Eraser is actually a pretty fun movie, and not even just for the genre. But it also contains a handful of markers that I think perfectly exemplify why 80s action heroes weren’t able to survive the 1990s. First and foremost, Eraser demonstrates how badly these movies struggled with the rise of digital effects. The low-fi spirit of 80s action doesn’t mix well with liberal CGI. This specific subgenre needs practical effects, like dozens of bloody squibs for every shootout, massive in-camera explosions bordering on the criminally negligent, and real cars driven across real chasms by real maniacs. It’s part of what makes the action still have any kind of real-world impact, because everything else is a cartoon. The hero is a cartoon, the dialogue is cartoonish, and the set pieces themselves are overblown and cartoonish. If we cut out the lone element of realism, meaning the practical action and stunt work, there’s no longer anything tethering it to reality, and therefore nothing for the audience to connect with,

so the movie fails at its job of escapism. It’s like building an amusement park ride and forgetting to install seats, or showing someone a size chart of a bunch of dinosaurs without a little human figure thrown in there for scale. It all looks very impressive, but you’ve denied me the ability to insert myself into the action, so it’s hard for me to stay interested. You can really feel the digital effect growing pains in Eraser. This movie is loaded with visual effects that are downright laughable, including but not limited to a pack of embarrassingly cartoonish alligators and a midair dogfight between a parachuting Kruger and a jumbo jet that looks on par with those booths they have at the mall where you can pay to insert yourself into a Color Me Badd music video. Now, Eraser did not invent the storied tradition of shoddy green screen compositing by any means. But the parachuting scene is a prime example of how certain techniques, especially during this early period of the digital effects renaissance brought on by Jurassic Park,

simply don’t pair well with the kind of action that made Schwarzenegger a global star. (Compare it to a similar midair action scene in Stallone’s Cliffhanger, which uses compositing along with a heaping helping of practical aerial stunts.) The CGI in Eraser looked dated at the time and was just another reminder that what we were seeing wasn’t real. 80s action movies already push our suspension of disbelief to its absolute breaking point, so they certainly don’t need the extra help. Schwarzenegger’s later action films limped out of the decade on crutches made of similarly dodgy CGI, most notably End of Days and The 6th Day. Stallone’s Judge Dredd and Daylight also feature some questionable digital effects, and the budget VFX orgy that is Seagal’s Under Siege 2: Dark Territory remains a formidable monument to unintentional comedy. The point is, every 80s action star rode the 90s digital effects wave with the same disastrous onscreen results, and I genuinely believe that hurt the genre.

There’s also the inevitable element of fatigue. In my opinion, the birth of the 80s action hero occurred somewhere between 1982 and 1985 with Conan, Rocky 3, The Terminator, and Rambo: First Blood Part II. (Conan doesn’t quite fit into the genre despite kickstarting Schwarzenegger’s action career, but that’s a rant for another time.) It ran strong until around 1993 and 1994, which saw hits like Cliffhanger and True Lies, until petering out through 1995 and 1996, ending with its final big hit, Eraser. That’s a solid decade of buff explosions, and improbably, unjustly, even that grows tiresome. You can feel the fatigue setting in when you watch Eraser. The tone is at odds with previous landmark entries on Schwarzenegger’s action resume like Commando and Predator, where he’d waste villains with some dopey quip on par with the most groanworthy dad jokes. But he did so with a certain level of

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earnestness to keep the audience on board – if the hero can’t even stomach how ridiculous his movie is, why should he expect you to? (This is admittedly a fine line to walk, as Schwarzenegger whipping a massive knife into a dude’s chest and grinning “Stick around” in Predator is an undeniable success, whereas Jeremy Renner saying “We’re fighting an army of robots and I have a bow and arrow, none of this makes sense” in Avengers: Age of Ultron is a smug, audience-betraying failure.) Arnold wastes dudes with the same kinds of quips throughout Eraser, but at this late stage of his 80s action hero career, he’s a little too in on the joke. Of equally critical importance is the fact that Eraser came after Last Action Hero and True Lies, two films that pushed the envelope by joyfully deconstructing the genre’s tropes, many of which Schwarzenegger himself had a hand in creating.

Last Action Hero is a great film that bombed at the time and has become well-regarded in retrospect, while True Lies was a blockbuster mega-hit that did a better job of disguising its deconstructive elements with a crackling script and some all-time classic set pieces. Audiences were ready for this new kind of action movie, but they didn’t know it just yet. So, when you add a Schwarzenegger performance closer to the self-aware deconstruction of Last Action Hero and True Lies to a film like Eraser, an unabashed Commando clone with a fresh coat of 90s paint, the result feels out of synch with itself. Arnold seems tired of the movie even as he’s still lumbering through it with all of his considerable, charismatic might, and consequently we feel tired of it, too. The genre was evolving, and Eraser is a weird missing link containing conflicting elements of both the old and the new.

It’s interesting to note what kinds of action movies began to wrestle control of the multiplexes from Schwarzenegger and Stallone during this period. Specifically, the mid-90s marked the dawn of Bayhem. Michael Bay’s first film, the Will Smith/Martin Lawrence action-comedy Bad Boys, hit theaters in the summer of 1995, dragging audiences weary of 80s action heroes into a new era of massively budgeted ensemble spectacles. In addition to Bad Boys, Face/Off, Con Air, Broken Arrow, The Rock, and Armageddon were all released between 1995 and 1998. All those films feature huge set pieces containing a mind-blowing assault of the kinds of practical effects 80s action fans crave, including buck wild car chases and explosions so enormous they generate their own weather systems. Notably, these films also trade in one-man army beefcakes for more realistically proportioned “everyman”

heroes like Nicolas Cage and Will Smith. (Again, Smith stretches the acceptable definition of “everyman” here, but you get the idea.) As action moved from the 90s into the new millennium, Bayhem became the template, and the dear beefcakes of the 1980s became dinosaurs. Through no fault of its own, Eraser was poised at the lip of that new horizon, and even though it keeps its balance through the end credits, you can almost feel it finally topple over when those credits fade to black. Eraser is a unique film in the truest sense of the word. Within a vacuum, it’s a breezy, enjoyable action flick with some iffy special effects but a great deal of throwback appeal. However, it’s arguably more interesting as an artifact of its time, a perfect cross-section of an increasingly dramatic identity crises within the action genre that ultimately resulted in the killing of the beefiest golden geese in cinema history.