Red Heat (1988)

Director: Walter Hill

Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Belushi, Peter Boyle, Ed O'Ross, Laurence Fishburne, Gina Gershon, Brion James

More info: IMDb

Tagline: Moscow's toughest detective. Chicago's craziest cop. There's only one thing worse than making them mad. Making them partners.

Plot: Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a Russian policeman sent after a Georgian drug dealer who has escaped to the United States and is awaiting extradition in Chicago. Jim Belushi plays his temporary partner on the Chicago police. When the drug dealer escapes, the two police must overcome their differences in order to recapture him.

My rating: 6/10

Will I watch it again? Niet.

It's been over 20 years since I last saw this. I don't remember much about it. There's a reason for that...it's not memorable. Watching it again last night jogged my brain a little but I'm willing to bet that in a couple of months I will have forgotten most of it...again. It's just not really any fun and it's my second least favorite of Arnold's 1980s pictures (with a very distant RED SONJA (1985) taking the prize for the worst). In this picture Arnold doesn't so much as crack a smile (very much like a robot with a performance like one, too), Belushi is his usual wisecracking self but a lot less playful and it was nice to see Gina Gershon in an early role. I usually dig Walter Hill's movies (OK, so I've only seen (except for a couple of his later pictures) everything he did up through 1982) but this one, while well-crafted, just doesn't have any sense of fun to it. It just felt like a flick that's done by the numbers but without that spark of life that makes a movie enjoyable. I won't be coming back to this well again.