A Terrible Arnold Schwarzenegger Movie Is Somehow Made Worse In The Reboot Trailer
Just... why?
This article is more than 2 years old
Arnold Schwarzenegger is having a rough couple of weeks. On one hand, the Terminator star has just about every pro-Putin pundit in Russia gunning for him after his video — pleading to the Russian people to see the truth of the invasion of Ukraine — went viral. Now his legacy is under attack, though thankfully it’s not exactly a particularly well-regarded part of his legacy anyway. One of Schwarzenegger’s worst movies — the action thriller Eraser — is being rebooted and it looks even worse than the original did in 1996.
The direct-to-video reboot Eraser: Reborn replaces Arnold Schwarzenegger’s U.S. Marshal John Kruger with U.S. Marshal Mason Pollard, played by Dominic Sherwood. You may know Sherwood from the Freeform supernatural drama Shadowhunters, or as the chauffeur Kurt in Penny Dreadful: City of Angels. The other top-billed cast include McKinley Belcher III (Marriage Story) as who appears to be a rival Marshal, Jacky Lai — another Shadowhunters alum — as the client Pollard is protecting, and Eddie Ramos as one of Pollard’s allies. Ramos is a reboot veteran, having appeared in both MTV’s Teen Wolf series and Fox’s Lethal Weapon show. You can see them all in the trailer below, if for some reason you really want to.
If you did yourself the disservice of hitting play on the video above and sitting through it all then, as you can tell, Eraser: Reborn has managed to take a horrible Arnold Schwarzenegger movie and make it worse. They even pay tribute — if you can call it that — to the badly-rendered CGI alligators of Eraser with at least one badly-rendered CGI hippo. The trailer is filled with poor impersonations of already overdone action tropes, and about as many actors as most moviegoers would recognize in the premiere episode of a CW series. Overall, while it’s perhaps cruel to judge something before you see the finished product, the fact that Eraser: Reborn is a direct-to-video production should surprise exactly zero people.
Arnold Schwazrzenegger hit his initial peak as far as action fare was concerned in the mid-90s with the classic action comedy True Lies. After that, things took a downward turn with stuff we all could have done without like End of Days, The 6th Day, and yes, Eraser. While Eraser proved bad enough to earn not only a 38% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, but a matching 39% audience score, it at least delivered on the talent side of things. Eraser‘s cast included Vanessa Williams (Ugly Betty), James Caan (The Godfather), and James Cromwell (L.A. Confidential).
This isn’t the first time an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie that should never have been rebooted has nevertheless, against all laws of nature, been rebooted. Colin Farrell (The Batman) stepped into Arnold’s shoes with 2012’s Total Recall — remaking the 1990 classic — to the joy of absolutely no one. Again, unlike Eraser: Reborn, the new Total Recall at least brought some big names to the table like Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad), Kate Beckinsale (Underworld), Jessica Biel (The Illusionist), John Cho (Star Trek), and Bill Nighy (Love Actually).
Eraser: Reborn releases digitally and on Blu-ray/DVD on June 7. Later this year, for some reason, it will stream on HBO Max. In the meantime, if anyone touches Commando, we assume Arnold Schwarzenegger will — at the very least — revoke their invitation to da choppa.
