Walter Hill's Red Heat is a Product of the Curious Period When James Belushi Could Co-Headline a Movie With Arnold Schwarzenegger
The Belush and Arnold. What could go wrong?
It’s crazy to think that there was a time when James Belushi was so big that he could co-headline a movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
That’s nuts because Schwarzenegger is one of the biggest movie stars of the past fifty years while his co-star is John Belushi’s less talented brother.
Belushi was not as popular as Schwarzenegger at the time. Very few people were. Schwarzenegger’s name was first on the call list but second was James Belushi.
I love mismatched buddy cop movies. Walter Hill is one of my all-time favorite action filmmakers. As a former longtime resident of Chicago, I get a special thrill from movies filmed there.
So why has it taken me forty-seven years to see 1988’s Red Heat? I have no idea! The nice thing about being diagnosed with autism and ADHD as an adult is that I no longer have to wonder why my brain is a mystery to me and I fundamentally do not understand why I do the things I do.
Red Heat is a Cold War action comedy filmed and released when the Cold War was almost over. Yet the film also anticipates Russia’s tragic yet strangely inevitable shift from Communism to a country ruled by crime and chaos, and that creep Putin.
Hill’s fish out of water action-comedy defies expectations by featuring a protagonist from a Communist country who does not instantly fall in love with our country and want to defect.
Hill might not have invented the contemporary buddy comedy but his 1982 surprise blockbuster 48 Hours was a milestone in the subgenre and the template for many buddy comedies to follow.
Red Heat follows mismatched buddy cop formula in many ways but has some fascinating and distinctly Hill variations. For example, the relationship between Schwarzenegger’s Captain Ivan Danko and James Belushi’s Detective Sergeant Art Ridzik is 100 percent professional throughout.
Though the very different men learn to not hate each other by the end there are thankfully no bonding scenes where they get drunk at a bar and tell each other all their secrets.
Hill apparently asked Schwarzenegger to model his performance after Greta Garbo in Ninotchka. Schwarzenegger plays his super-cop as a man with the self-discipline and effectiveness of a finely tuned machine.
Unfortunately for anyone trying to buddy up with the glowering Russian, he has the personality of a machine as well. His performance here owes a great debt to his superstar-making in The Terminator.
Captain Ivan Danko would like to be a man of no words and is annoyed that police work requires international cooperation but also talking to other people on a regular basis.
In Red Heat vicious mobster Viktor Rosta (Ed O’Ross) flees Russia to make a giant heroin deal in Chicago. Losing the career criminal embarrasses a Russian police force that cares deeply about appearances. So it sends Schwarzenegger’s perpetually scowling muscle-man to the United States to deal with the problem quickly and quietly.
That proves impossible, however. When Viktor is being transported to the airport the cops are ambushed by his men and Detective Sergeant Art Ridzik’s partner Sergeant Max Gallagher (Richard Bright) is killed in the ensuing gunfight.
Art is left without a partner so he becomes Ivan’s minder in the United States. By this point in his career, Belushi had developed a persona as being exactly like John Belushi but without the sweetness, vulnerability, and genius.
He was a professional smart-ass who ended up playing a lot of police officers and other men of action because if you want to be a working actor in Hollywood you have to a make an effort not to play cops.
Funnymen like Belushi are cast as cops because those are the lead roles available to them. If Ivan Danko represents the stoic self-sufficiency of the Russian people then Art represents our country in all of its ragged, half-assed glory.
He’s a smart-ass and a wisecracker who gets a lot from his Russian counterpart when it comes to police work and hunting down Viktor and nothing from him when it comes to conversation.
Ivan is monosyllabic. He seemingly would prefer not to talk to anyone in Russia or the United States, but that proves impossible.
This plays to Schwarzenegger’s strengths as both an actor and a movie star. There’s generally a winking, tongue-in-cheek quality to Schwarzenegger vehicles that lets audiences know that the former governor of California realizes just how ridiculous his movies are.
That’s not present in Red Heat. Hill and Shwarzenegger’s conception of the character is unapologetically minimalist. He begins the film as an exemplar of brawny law and orders with ice water in his veins, and that’s how he ends the film as well.
Red Heat has a supporting cast that is almost too good. Time and again the film will introduce a fascinating character played by a heavyweight character actor and then forget about them.
I was excited to see Laurence Fishburne as a buttoned-up colleague of Art’s but he’s gone after twenty minutes.
Brent Jennings, meanwhile, has a mesmerizing role as a blind, incarcerated career criminal who has turned to religion as his new grift. It’s a scene-stealing performance despite lasting only a single scene.
It feels like there is a cut of Red Heat that is two and a half hours long and would flesh out the supporting characters but they opted to keep things relatively tight at one hundred and three minutes.
Cinematographer Matthew F. Leonetti gives Russia an icy beauty and Chicago a lurid sheen. It takes place in the sleazy, sad parts of the city that tourists don’t visit.
I respect that Ivan never seems particularly impressed with anything he encounters in the United States, with the possible exception of a partner he comes to almost like by the very end.
Ivan’s religion is Communism but his real passion is his profession; he’s defined by his job. His motivation is never anything other than getting the bad guy by any means necessary.
That’s how Communists were generally seen during the Cold War: as hyper-efficient, scarily self-disciplined super-people who were going to destroy us with their incredible strength.
Then we found out that they were actually just a bunch of sad drunks trapped in a failed system.
Red Heat gets off to a roaring start with a near-naked fight in the snow and climaxes with a bus chase that follows in the tradition of James’ brother, ’s The Blues Brothers, in joyously fucking up Chicago for no damn reason at all, beyond child-like glee at things smashing together and going kaboom.
Red Heat is good but it should be great. All the elements for a Walter Hill masterpiece are there but they never quite come together in an entirely satisfying way, perhaps because Hill was trying to reconcile his signature style with the impossible demands of a big-budget Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle.
I’m glad I finally caught up with Red Heat, in part because it is a high water mark in Belushi’s career, and came at a time when superstardom seemed, if inevitable, then at least possible.
Belushi would of course go on to make a lot of action movies in the years and decades ahead but few, if any, have as much going for them as Red Heat.
I would like to say, once again, that while Jim Belushi didn't have John's comedic genius, he IS a better actor than John, who never settled down enough to give a performance.
Jim Belushi was and is a good character actor who had the misfortune to be related to a comic genius who burnt out at a young age.
I just wanted to chime in here that Ed O'Ross was and is one of my favorite character actors, and he sure made his mark in the 80s and in this film. Walter Hill's tight hand on the reins ensures that although it is entertaining, it is not quite campy like many of Arnold's other actioners. I appreciated that.
Also, I'm only now wondering whether the opening fight in any way inspired the similar scene in Eastern Promises.