Viktor’s (remember, spit it out) henchmen in Chicago are an inner city gang composed entirely of African-Americans who have adopted a militant pseudo-Islamic stance. This is more than a little indelicate on behalf of the moviemakers. Inner city gangs are certainly a real world problem but “Red Heat’s” connection to the real world is at best tangential. Still, as “Training Day” makes abundantly clear, it’s just as bad to tell a black actor he can’t play a villain as it is to tell him he can’t play a hero. And the cats in this movie (among them J.W. Smith and Brent Jennings) are pretty menacing in the way they hold their guns and deliver lines like “you can’t scare me white boy” and “Viktor set us up!”
An aging rule of thumb is that you can have minority bad guys as long as you balance them with minority good guys. Laurence Fishburne (here still “Larry”) gives an effective performance as a police lieutenant between Boyle and Belushi in the chain of command. He’s on the right side of the law but is relegated to the role of snide pencil-pusher, relishing his opportunity to bust Belushi down to being a desk cop. The distance that Fishburne sticks out his jaw is usually inversely related to how much we’re supposed to like him. (The name of Fishburne’s character in “Apocalypse Now” is Clean, and here he faces a razor-friendly streetgang known as the Cleanheads.) Another fading rule of thumb is that if you use one stereotype you have to use them all, and, believe me, the world-weary, doughnut-munching, suspect-beating, bad suit-wearing cops in this movie, at work in a police station with circa-1948 telephone rings, are just as stereotyped.
That’s the set-up and the result is all manner of mayhem, including a chase through a bus station, a shoot-out in a sleazy motel, and a footchase through a snowy Russian plaza (this is the first Western movie to film in Red Square legally). “Red Heat” is almost fifteen years old, and as a result its action sequences are short, brutal, and direct, as was the style in the 1980s. Using nothing but practical effects, they seem downright plausible when compared to to recent John Woo cartoons, or CGI-heavy movies like “The Matrix” and “The X-Men,” in which surprisingly bloodless fight sequences just go on and on. The real draw isn’t the fighting, but Schwarzenegger’s deadpan response to it, as well as Belushi’s, who at times seems to have been inserted into the movie just to make fun of it. Along the way, we hear lots of Russians speaking with minimal mastery of English articles, resulting in sentences like “your brother was criminal,” “Viktor says for you to get in car,” and “you are a stupid.”
The movie is the work of Walter Hill, who specializes in glossy, efficient male action movies in which guys spend most of their time bullshitting or beating each other back into the Stone Age. Women in his movies have limited speaking parts, and the one woman in “Red Heat” (Gina Gershon), billed fifth or even sixth, is a dance instructor, a former prostitute, and referred to as “bitch” multiple times. Hill’s credits as director include both “48 Hrs.” movies, “Trespass,” “Undisputed,” and multiple episodes of “Tales from the Crypt.” As a writer he worked on the first three “Alien” pictures. The score to “Red Heat” is by James Horner, and bares a strong resemblance to his music for another (and better) Russian movie, “Gorky Park,” directed by Michael Apted.
If you’re in the mood for something Russian, and “Dr. Zhivago” and “Andrei Roublev” are looking just a little too cerebral for you, you can do a lot worse than “Red Heat.” Excuse me, you can do a lot worse than heat…“RED HEAT!!” Golly.
Finished July 13, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Friday & Saturday Night
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