Monday, Jul. 01, 1996

ARNOLD, BACK TO BASICS

By RICHARD CORLISS

The bad guys have chased Vanessa Williams into the reptile house of a Manhattan zoo, when Arnold Schwarzenegger shows up. He fires a round into the alligator case, breaking the glass and freeing dozens of killer creatures. They eat most of the villains like canapes, but one of the beasts heads for our star. It's about to devour him when he blasts the gator to leathereens. "You're luggage," Arnold observes.

He's baaaack. After three jokey films (Last Action Hero, Junior, True Lies) that defiled the great stone totem that is Schwarzenegger, Eraser is a return to basics. The film, which had a troubled history and a humongous reported price tag of $120 million, could have been a fiasco; instead, it smartly remythologizes this indispensable Hollywood icon.

As a U.S. Marshal in the Witness Protection Program, Arnold is really Special Agent in Charge of Blowing Stuff Up. Is he human? No, he's super- and sub-. He can outshoot, outpunch and outthink any adversary; he survives all manner of impalement. Hell, he can even type. And he has the superhero's belief in his own invincibility. Unarmed and surrounded by villains pointing heavy artillery at him, Arnold tells his main captor, "If you drop your gun, I promise I won't kill you."

At this moment our star is in a plane over New York City. He needs to reach his main witness (Williams) before some malevolent brutes erase her identity by wiping her out. Figuring that the shortest distance between two points is straight down, Arnold throws a parachute out the plane door, jumps after it, flies like Superman to catch up with it, then dodges the plane as it circles back to kill him.

It's a neat stunt--one of the scenes that make Eraser, like The Rock, a medium-high entry in the action genre. Briskly directed by Charles Russell, Eraser seems a near-photostat of Mission Impossible (the break-in of a secretive Washington-area facility to use a computer, the duplicitous father figure who must be killed) but with more brio. It also boasts some of the genre's standard idiocies. The script, by Tony Puryear, Walon Green and Michael S. Chernuchin, dreams up a new era of hand-held weaponry: a heat-seeking assault rifle. But the bad guys can't shoot straight enough with these can't-miss guns to hit either star. When they are on target, they often kill one another.

Williams is the damsel in distress; she gets to kick and shoot a few bad people, but at the climax, when she needs to pick up a gun, it slips through her fingers. (Girls--can't they do anything?) James Caan, as Arnold's boss, nicely gauges the power and menace of a G-man too long in the game; when he says the word patriotism, it sounds like "paid treason." Schwarzenegger, of course, is a paid tree trunk. And for the first time in a while, his character is as solid as he is. Welcome back, big guy.

--By Richard Corliss