Where I Watched It: HBo MAX

English Audio Description?: No

No, sadly there is no audio description for the long awaited Eraser sequel, 26 years in the making. Sequel is also the wrong word. It’s basically a remake, hitting all of the same plot points as the original, just doing so with a cast full of people you’ll never see or hear from again. Arnold Schwarzenegger got swapped out for someone who is so totally devoid of personality I don’t even want to repeat his name, for that might cause him to get cast again, and I’d rather he and the entire cast of this film disappear.

It’s not that the original Eraser is so perfect that it can’t be remade. Arguably, it’s pointless to do so since the film was really just a vehicle for Arnold in the first place. It’s not that unique, and when you strip away the leading man, as well as an excellent James Caan as the villain, and Vanessa Williams as the helpless witness, Eraser is just an action film generic enough to ignore. It would be like suddenly finding out that they were mounting a remake of Passenger 57. It was just a star vehicle for Wesley Snipes. Why? Why not just create something new? inevitably, by putting Eraser on this, you draw comparisons, and those are not ones you want to draw.

This lead versus Arnold is like asking someone if they want to eat grass, or a meal cooked by Wolfgang Puck. There’s such a disparity between these projects, it’s disturbing. And on top of that, in what I can only assume was yet another tax write off in the Warner Discovery merger from hell, they didn’t even bother to add audio description, reminding us how little they think not just of us, but this film.

Why doesn’t this have a grade of F, you ask? Well, considering how much of this film I couldn’t follow because it was just action sequences with no description, I really appreciated the score. And oddly, because it copied the formula from Eraser, which actually is a fun action film, I enjoyed it even more than some other shitty films this year, like Interceptor. That’s the thing about formulas, is that you lose points for originality, but it often keeps you from bottoming out completely. It’s like coloring in a coloring book. Even if you choose radical colors, if you stay between the lines, it’s hard to mess it up entirely.

And that’s what they did here. They used all the wrong colors, but stayed within the lines.

But, again, I can’t forgive lack of audio description on an action film. Blind people deserve to understand shitty films too. That’s true equality, when not just the biggest releases, the most classic films, or the best reviewed have audio description, but even crap like this.

Final Grade: D