It helps to have a short attention span while watching “Eraser,” the new Arnold Schwarzenegger picture. Consider, for example, a sequence late in the film, where Arnold is shot through the left shoulder. He grabs his shoulder and grimaces. From the bullet's point of entry, we guess his shoulder bone is broken and there is a lot of muscle damage. Immediately afterward, Arnold is in a fight to the death with the villain (James Caan) on top of a shipping container that has been lifted high in the air by a crane. The heroine (Vanessa Williams) is also on the container, and she falls off. But Arnold is able to grab her out of the air. He holds her with his right hand, and supports the weight of both of them with his left hand and arm. That's a neat trick after a bullet has shattered your shoulder. But wait. If you think way back to the movie's second big action sequence, near the beginning of the film, Arnold and Vanessa are the targets of a nail bomb, which explodes, driving a spike completely through Arnold's right hand--the one he later holds Williams with. A guy like that, he could play basketball on bad ankles for weeks. How does he do it? I guess he has plumb forgotten the spike through his hand. There have been a lot of distractions, like being attacked by alligators at the New York City Zoo, and falling out of an airplane without his parachute, and shooting at a Boeing 727 with a handgun. Arnold is amazingly serene under this duress. After he shoots the alligator through the head, he tells it, “You’re luggage!” The plot of “Eraser” involves Vanessa Williams as Lee Cullen, an employee of a defense contractor who stumbles across evidence that a secret cabal inside the U.S. government is illegally exporting advanced weapons systems. In particular, they're selling the Rail Gun. What is a Rail Gun? Allow the movie's director, Charles Russell, to explain: “Rail guns are hyper-velocity weapons that shoot aluminum or clay rounds at just below the speed of light.” Uh huh. Just below the speed of light? Which is 186,282 miles a second? What happens to aluminum and clay rounds shot at that speed? They don’t pulverize or anything, do they? That muzzle velocity doesn't cause overheating or anything, I suppose? At least there's no recoil when the bullets leave the guns at just below the speed of light. I know that because at one point Arnold holds a Rail Gun in each hand (including the injured right one) and fires them simultaneously. What is amazing is that Charles Russell wants us to believe these guns are plausible. “These guns,” he elaborates in the press notes, “represent a whole new technology in weaponry that is still in its infancy, though a large-scale version exists in limited numbers on battleships and tanks.
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