Have we come to that point in the movie business industry where going back to an 80s/90s action film structure is in style now? If you’re not familiar with that structure it consists of a few things:
- Unstoppable and incorruptible hero immune to deadly bullets
- A damsel in distress that falls for the hero
- An evil villain that is incredibly too strong for logic to explain
- A henchman that is a mini-boss fight before the big fight
- A shallow script full of one-liners
Don’t get me wrong, this worked in the 80s/90s. It worked in Arnie’s ERASER that came out in 1996. It worked with every single action film from 1980 – to 2000. This structure is immovable as it is empty, but it’s an action structure, which means thinking is unnecessary because it’s just straight-up entertaining.
Warner Home Video has released a remake for ERASER called ERASER: REBORN. Is it unnecessary? Lord, yes, but to their credit, it’s nice to see an action film so devoid of plot and purpose that it pays tribute to what once was in this classic genre and what could be again in the future. Action films can be such a rollercoaster ride without needing a reason.
Let’s get right to it.
Official Synopsis
ERASER: REBORN, a reboot of the 1996 blockbuster, follows US Marshal Mason Pollard, a specialist in engineering the fake deaths of witnesses that need to leave no trace of their existence. In this never-before-seen clip from the film, Mason Pollard (played by Dominic Sherwood) tells Rina Kimura (played by Jacky Lai) what was done to set her up with a new identity.
The first act of the film starts by explaining what Mason Pollard (Dominic Sherwood) is in the U.S. Marshal business. He is simply an eraser, someone who fakes the death of a client to ensure they live a normal and safe life. Of course, the film opens with Mason saving the life of a wacky secondary character named Sugar Jax (Eddie Ramos), who double-crossed some gang members and must be saved. He is saved by Pollard and Sugar’s death is faked. Credit to the writers for not sitting down and giving a fair amount of explanation of Pollard’s life work, rather they chose to show it in motion. That is a huge plus, as they grew their character through action – as an action film should do.
Now, it’s time for the plot of the film to begin.
We’re introduced to Rina Kimura (Jacky Lai) and her abusive, somewhat shady boyfriend who uses her to gain trust from businessmen and objectifies her every chance he can get. Fed up with being used and objectified, and secretly working with the FBI to bring her boy toy down, she accidentally ‘takes care of’ her boyfriend during a party and goes on the lamb…after she steals his secret crypto codes to gain access to a ba-jillion dollars. Her first stop is at her lawyer’s house, which protects her from the feds, who are more than slightly upset that she killed the only person that could bring down the syndicate. The latter is a mysterious group of criminals that steal and gain goods through illegal means. The explanation of the syndicate honestly doesn’t get more complicated than that sentence, which puts them into a generic villain category, while also leaving the door open for more Eraser films. If you don’t go into too many details about the villain organization, then you can keep creating bad guys without explaining how they got there. MGM did it for years with SPECTRE in the Bond series and it just provides an endless amount of villain options. Cheap? A little, but effective.
And back to the film.
The feds and Rina’s lawyers try to convince her to go into their witness protection program, led by Pollard, but she declines and instead goes to bunk with her lawyer, who believes that pissing off a gang of criminals is a cause for a rooftop wine party. Let’s celebrate our victory over an entire syndicate of criminals by going on the rooftop in Los Angeles out in the open air…right beside other rooftops…where people can gain access easily.
Oh, you know what’s coming.
As act one ends, her lawyer guzzles a bullet box of wine, Pollard decides to show up to save Rina from a tragic ending, and act one ends with Pollard and Rina going on the lamb together. Shortly after the bullets rain down on the wine party parade, Pollard takes care of the bad guys, drops a fake/dead body off the roof of the apartment, erases Rina, and somehow convinces Rina to finally go into the witness protection program (duh) and ships her off to Cape Town South Africa. Cape Town is an actual lovely place for the most part, though a randomly weird choice for witness protection. Rina starts her new life, while she waits to be called as a witness to her boyfriend’s crimes and to bring down the syndicate in the process.
All is well, right? Wrong.
Act two begins with Rina’s cover being blown and the U.S. Marshal service having to send in a group of marshals led by Pollard’s boss, and trustworthy friend Paul Whitlock (McKinley Belcher III) to extract everyone who has been ratted out, which includes Rina. The most wonderful part of this act is how the syndicate finds Pollard. They don’t even explain. They do nothing other than giving a single order, and boom…Pollard found. The feds don’t seem very secure with their information. Granted, later, in the big reveal, you understand how they do this, but the writing wasn’t even holding the cards close to the chest, it felt like the story hadn’t been completely flushed out at this point in the film. When the big reveal happens, you’re just like, “What? We didn’t even get a build-up to it”.
Well, the big reveal happens when the marshal group meets up with Pollard and you learn that his boss, and mentor, Paul, turns on Pollard for the syndicate in hopes of getting that secret crypto code that Rina has on her personal. Here’s my problem with this reveal moment. We see Paul once in act one when he is sparring with Pollard. I didn’t mention him in act one because the interaction between Pollard and him was meaningless to the situation. That said, the brief encounter gives the viewer details about Paul that include:
- Paul is the boss
- Paul is Pollard’s mentor
- They are friends IRL
- Paul also lets off a quip about how there is no hope for their line of work in the future.
This scene lasts around two minutes, but we’re expected to take all that information and return to it later in the film when Paul turns on Pollard? That’s a hard sale. That is just lazy character development for a major character that shifts the entire story. The action films back in the day would build up that relationship between the two characters, sell how good the characters are together, even sometimes causing an almost tragic sacrifice to sell that relationship harder, but then turn it on its head to make the audience gasp. It’s a classic 80s/90s action move that worked time and time again. That type of moment in ERASER: REBORN’s story never happens, so it feels unearned and almost uninteresting because we didn’t know Paul well enough to make this reveal meaningful. You have to build up more character development to sell the hard U-turn between friends, otherwise, you’re doing the story a great disservice.
As the movie shifts into fifth gear, it becomes what it wanted to become from the moment the WB logo faded into the first scene, a pure action film. You have Pollard and Rina on the run, dodging bullets, becoming sleuths, and uncovering the end game of the syndicate and Paul. To boot, the film brings back Sugar Jax into the mix, who was also relocated to Cape Town, and he becomes a tool for Pollard and Rina to keep existing. I did enjoy Ramos’ Jax more than I thought I would, as he played the part like a young John Leguizamo with such spirit and humor, but also a dab of badassery.
After quite a few chases and double-crosses, as well as deaths, the film finally enters its third act. Paul is ready to fight Pollard because you need that mentor/lacky fight to determine who is the king of the hill. Rina and Pollard slowly start to fall for each other in the meantime (actually, since act two – proper for an action film), and loose ends get tied up. While you could probably guess how this film ends, I won’t spoil it for you.
ERASER: REBORN has the typical structure from the 80s/90s action flick but suffers from a lack of character development and meaningful writing. If you know this is an action movie that just wants to run on pure action with little substance, then you’re going to enjoy this. For me, I think its structure screams typical action, but it could probably never live up to what those decades produced in that genre that is still considered classics today (Total Recall, The Terminator, etc.).
