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| Red Heat |
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  (6/10)
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Runtime: 106 |
| Public Rating: 6.42 (43 votes) |
Director: Walter Hill |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Action/Comedy |
Year: 1988 |
| Writer(s): Walter Hill, Harry Kleiner, and Troy Kennedy Martin |
| Reviewed by: Friday and Saturday Night Critic |
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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.”
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 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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 Printable Version
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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
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