**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Belushi, Peter Boyle, Ed O’Ross, Laurence Fishburne, Gina Gershon, Richard Bright, Brent Jennings, Bryon James, Pruit Taylor Vince, and J.W. Smith
Directed by Walter Hill & written by Hill, Harry Kleiner, and Troy Kennedy Martin
1988 R
What’s there not to like about “Red Heat?” It has a car chase with busses, for crying out loud, resulting in two guys, each with his own bus, driving head on toward each other while screaming. It has Arnold Schwarzenegger, oiled up and wearing nothing but a towel, holding a hot coal in his bare hand, and then using that hand to punch a guy through a wall. It has a wholly deserted parking garage in downtown Chicago. We hear tires squeal while cars go five miles an hour, and we have multiple scenes of nearly-nude straight guys pumping iron with biceps the size of Thanksgiving turkeys.
I’ll admit “Red Heat” does not have an original moment in it. I’ll admit it’s just another buddy action movie about two cops who don’t get along. Here’s the tagline: “a pair of mismatched cops…with this much friction there’s gotta be heat…RED HEAT!” And I’ll admit the plot is the same neglible mess of drug dealers and double crosses, snitches and shoot-outs, and plot-convenient bail-jumping. But the allure for “Red Heat” is that the two mismatched cops are at times actually pretty funny. On the one hand we have Schwarzenegger, stiff-as-a-surfboard Soviet cop, who has come to Chicago to catch a Russian crook, shoot bad guys, and break things. And on the other hand we have his caretaker, a Chicago sergeant played by James Belushi, who is all complaints, swear words, and jelly doughnuts. We get the feeling comedian Belushi got to make up a fair share of his own dialogue. One of the joys of this movie is watching him run, which he does with his head down, looking something like a bull.
The great thing about Arnie in this movie is that he is surprisingly vulnerable. Maybe he’s not vulnerable if you have a beat-up VHS copy or if your TV’s getting bad reception. But you can tell in his eyes and the way he looks around that, despite being a mountain of man, he is afraid of many things. He is not so much brave and unstoppable as he is completely devoted to his duty, and we admire his unswerving loyalty to his code. But Schwarzenegger’s duty is an end in itself and he doesn’t seem to totally believe in the Soviet system. There’s something child-like about him, when he’s not plugging bagmen with multiple slugs from high-caliber pistols. That quiet-boy innocence appears early in the film when we witness the slow delicacy with which he papers his pet parakeet’s cage, and appears again when Belushi learns about the bird and Schwarzenegger must defend his choice of pet.
The other soloist in this double concerto of one-liners and violence is James Belushi, who by the way he behaves we are amazed to learn he is even a police officer at all, let alone a detective-sergeant. He whines about every assignment he’s given and mouths off to every superior he has. We see Belushi working his typewriter slowly with one finger, we see him arguing with his superiors over which form to fill out, and we see him marveling over the breasts of hookers. In his capacity as a police officer there is not a single person whom he interviews without insulting. Naturally he dislikes Schwarzenegger. His first partner in the movie is played by reliable character actor Richard Bright, whose fate is sealed by the requirements of the genre. I saw “Red Heat” six or seven times before realizing Bright had played Corleone inner-circle member Al Neri in all three “Godfather” pictures.
Together they are after one evil dude named Viktor (Ed O’Ross, the short-lived lieutenant in “Full Metal Jacket”), whose name is more often spat than spoken. His crime is wearing great, tacky Russian suits with big collars and loud colors. His hair is perpetually greasy and he always seems just on the verge of finishing his beard. Viktor betrays his own men, double crosses everyone, not so much for any reason I could detect but out of habit, and spends most of his time glowering with his head down. With Arnold he has the following exchange of dialogue: “You killed my friend.” “You killed my brother.” Our Heroes also must contend with the police chief, or captain, or commissioner, or commander, or whoever he is in this movie, always threatening to take Belushi’s badge away or assign him to a desk. The captain’s only other duty in “Red Heat” is to survey disaster areas impotently. As played lovingly by Peter Boyle, he is, like Belushi, the embodiment of all stereotypes about Yankee police cynicism. He gets to call Schwarzenegger a “loose cannon.”
Page two of "Red Heat." Back to home.