Eraser is more often just idiotic, with none of the true wildness that can goose a movie like Die Hard past popcorn thrills and into something close to art. The script, credited to Tony Puryear and Walon Green, could have been spat out of a Macintosh on one of those screenwriting software packages that combine different plot points from past hits. Arnie the Eraser has to protect Vanessa Williams, an FBI employee who discovers illegal government deals involving those cool super-guns. The director, Charles Russell, has an interesting track record that Eraser doesn t fit into. Russell is a fantasist, not a man of action, and the set pieces in Eraser are blurry and half-hearted.
Eraser does have a wild card, which isn t played nearly enough.
Robert Pastorelli, best known as Eldin the painter on Murphy Brown , turns up as a former Mafia goombah whom Arnie erases. Eraser is worth seeing just for Pastorelli s expression when he realizes his ruse is working far better than he intended. If only there were more to it. It works so hard to wipe the audience out that it ends up erasing itself.