Eraser

Chuck Russell's Eraser arrived in American theaters on June 21, 1996, carrying a $100 million budget and a premise that fit neatly into the decade's appetite for high-tech conspiracy thrillers. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays John Kruger, a deputy U.S. marshal in the Witness Security Program whose job is to give protected witnesses new identities so airtight that the people they testify against can never find them. The film pairs that premise with a defense-industry scandal involving a railgun, an electromagnetic weapon that fires projectiles at extraordinary velocity.

The supporting cast includes James Caan as Robert DeGuerin, a senior marshal whose loyalties stay ambiguous for much of the running time; Vanessa Williams as Lee Cullen, a Cyrez executive who copies files on an illicit arms sale and becomes the government's key witness; and James Coburn as Chief Beller, Kruger's mentor. Robert Pastorelli supplies comic relief as the informant Johnny Castelone, while James Cromwell plays the smooth Cyrez executive William Donahue and Nick Chinlund the enforcer Calderon. The screenplay is credited to Tony Puryear, Walon Green, and Michael S. Chernuchin, with Alan Silvestri composing the score and Adam Greenberg handling cinematography.

Warner Bros. released the film through Kopelson Entertainment, and it grossed $242,295,562 worldwide against its nine-figure budget. Reviews at the time treated it as a competent but conventional Schwarzenegger vehicle: the railgun sequences drew praise, the conspiracy plotting drew complaints about convolution, and the film did not generate a theatrical franchise. It remains a recognizable entry in the star's 1990s run, positioned between True Lies in 1994 and Jingle All the Way later in 1996. [edit]

John Kruger works for the United States Marshals Service, and his assignment within the Witness Security Program is narrow and exact: when a witness needs to disappear, Kruger makes it happen. He does not simply move people to new addresses. He constructs new identities, destroys old records, and arranges the kind of total erasure that leaves no thread for a determined pursuer to pull. The work rewards patience and planning over gunplay, though Kruger is physically capable when a situation turns. His superior and mentor is Chief Beller, who trained him in the tradecraft and represents the program's older, more principled generation.

Lee Cullen is a senior executive at Cyrez, a major defense contractor. While working there she discovers that the company is quietly selling advanced weapons technology to foreign buyers, among them a figure named Sergei Ivanovich Petrofsky. The centerpiece of the illicit trade is a railgun, an electromagnetic weapon capable of firing projectiles at extreme velocity. Cullen copies the incriminating files and agrees to testify, which makes her the government's most valuable witness in a case that reaches into the upper levels of the defense establishment. It also makes her a target for people with considerably more resources than an ordinary criminal.

Kruger is assigned to protect Cullen and prepare her for testimony. The arrangement goes wrong almost immediately. An attempt is made on Cullen's life, and a fellow agent is killed in the process. Kruger begins to suspect that the leak is internal, that someone inside the Marshals Service is passing information to the other side. His attention settles on Robert DeGuerin, a polished and ambitious senior marshal whose political connections and easy charm make him useful as an ally and difficult to read as a suspect. The film keeps DeGuerin's true position unresolved for most of its running time, letting Kruger's suspicion and his professional respect for the man pull against each other.

What Kruger does next is what he has built his career on. He stages Cullen's death and gives her a new identity, hiding her in a location he believes is secure. The conspirators find it anyway. With the safe house compromised and his own agency possibly turned against him, Kruger takes Cullen off the grid entirely. The two of them become fugitives together, the protector and the witness, while Kruger tries to gather enough evidence to expose the Cyrez arms deal and identify the traitor inside the service.

The middle stretch of the film is a running chase across a series of locations, with Kruger working two problems at once. He has to keep Cullen alive while hired killers, led by a ruthless enforcer named Calderon, close in. He also has to investigate his own colleagues without alerting them, knowing that the machinery of law enforcement can be aimed at him by the very people who corrupted it. He leans on a small circle of people he still trusts, among them the mob-connected informant Johnny Castelone, whose wisecracking manner masks a useful set of contacts, and Beller, whose institutional knowledge of the program helps Kruger see how the leak might have been engineered.

Along the way Kruger confronts the corporate side of the conspiracy. William Donahue, a Cyrez executive with the polished confidence of someone who has never expected to be held accountable, becomes a central figure in Kruger's investigation. The trail runs through corporate crime, treason, and political corruption, and the further Kruger follows it the clearer it becomes that the arms deal is protected at a level far above the people actually making the sale. The film builds toward a confrontation at a high-tech facility tied to the railgun project, where Kruger's knowledge of the protection program's methods and his capacity for improvisation will be tested against opponents who know his playbook as well as he does.[edit]