Red Heat (1988)

Tagline: Moscow’s toughest detective. Chicago’s craziest cop. There’s only one thing more dangerous than making them mad: making them partners.

Curiosity: I’m a big Schwarzenegger fan despite his sex scandal, but I somehow never saw Red Heat before now.

Plot: Moscow narcotics officer Ivan Danko (Schwarzenegger) is in (red) hot pursuit of the gangster Viktor Rostavili (Ed O’Ross), literally. He tracks the guy to a sweat lodge in the middle of nowhere. It’s like super hot in there, which is why all these muscley guys look super sweaty in the opening scene. It’s also why they’re only wearing, um… loincloths.

ANYWAY. Viktor escapes to America after killing Danko’s partner. Danko follows him to Chicago, where he gets partnered up with Jim Belushi (Played with great commitment by the actual Jim Belushi). Belushi is all like “I’m Eastern European-American! What could I possibly talk to this Eastern European about?! Also I like boobs and hamburgers!”

Danko and Belushi are so ethnically different! How are they gonna catch the bad guy?!

[SPOILER ALTERT]: Guns. They do it with guns.

Thoughts: I don’t know if I’m just getting older, but I did not care for Red Heat. Maybe I’ve just seen too many buddy cop movies, but Red Heat’s attempts at presenting Danko and Belushi as polar opposites is too much. It’s also horribly dated by its stereotyping. Rush Hour pokes fun at the Chinese, and there will surely be Chinese stereotypes to play on in the future, but Russian Communism fell apart two years after Red Heat came out. All those lazy jokes don’t work anymore.

Another problem with the film comes from the casting: Belushi feels so thoroughly useless throughout the movie. He doesn’t show up until about 20 minutes in, and never really does anything important. Schwarzenegger was/is the bigger star then/now, but hot-dang; Belushi literally contributes nothing to the movie besides shitty one-liners.

Still, this is classic Brownschwagger here. Arnie gets to kick ass and look cool throughout, and that opening scene in the sweat lodge really does look awesome/homoerotic.

Reflection: Shoulda cast Danny DeVito. That guy knows how to play off of Arnold.