Screenhead

And so, today, we close out our look at the Lions Gate four part Schwartzenegger Collection, a massive array of testosterone-laden shoot-em-ups and assorted ultraviolence, not to mention hours of sheer gleeful fun.  The final nugget in this grandiose collection of firepower and madness is Red Heat, a movie that proves that if you put a second-tier funnyman alongside a first-tier action hero, your end result is best described as a pretty good movie.

In Red Heat, Schwartzenegger plays a diehard Soviet cop (the Soviet Police Department motto: We beat more people with rubber hoses by ten am than most people beat in a lifetime) named Ivan Danko, whose preferred method of getting information seems to be:

1. Beat the hell out of whatever moves
2. Scream instructions at it
3. If it doesn’t move, beat the hell out of it until it does
3a. Once it moves, refer to Rule 1.

Anyway, our diehard Soviet cop is out to find a Russian mob figure by the name of Viktor Roska, only to discover, much to his dismay, that his mob target has gone the way of so many Russians and Eastern Europeans and Western Europeans before him and bugged out for America.

Enter Danko’s newfound partner and American contact, Art Ridzik (James Belushi).  Art’s a tough cop, sure enough, but definitely no match for the sheer automoton rigor Danko’s putting out there.  The two of them find themselves together, hunting down the mob boss and discovering there’s a whole lot more to the situation than either one expected.

Okay, sure–no one’s ever going to mistake this for a documentary on the subject of cooperation between the then-Soviet Union and the Chicago Police Department.  In fact, for when this was shot back in 1985 it was about as ludicrous an idea as they came.  Getting the Soviet police to work with elements of the Unted States was about as easy as keeping Heidi and Spencer out of the tabloids for more than twenty minutes at a stretch.  But what we’ve got here is one of the original buddy cop movies.  They may not be buddies when they start out, but by the time it’s all said and done, they’re buddies, such as it is.  Watching these two, the very definition of cold Soviet order and the very definition of tough American g0-getting tenacity is a surprisingly thrilling experience that will, almost in spite of itself, add some laughs.

We also get that nice, humbling “everyone has something you can learn from” lesson that happens in movies every so often–Denko will teach Art a few new tricks of order and maximum intimidation that Art never even thought possible, while Denko will discover that, sometimes, if you work around the rules you can actually get more done, and more effectively done.

Truly, if you want a movie that’ll not only have you glued to the action and explosions and even a little rear nudity from Schwartzenegger for the ladies, you could do wildly, WILDLY worse than Red Heat.  It’ll offer everything you expect–everything you want!–in an action movie and it’ll do it all in a fashion that will leave you glad you watched.

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