Script review - "Red Heat" (1988) by Walter Hill

Hard going. One of my least favourite Walter Hill scripts. The old leanness is gone replaced by this lumbersome thing, an attempt to recreate the success of Hill's 48 Hours - which to be blunt I wasn't that a big fan of either. But at least it had Eddie Murphy.

This one did have Arnold Schwarzenegger and to be fair the basic idea is excellent - a Russian cop comes to Chicago to arrest a crook and clashes with a Chicago cop. The sort of communism vs capitalism schtick worked well in Ninotchka and it's an excellent role for Arnie.

But the film fails to exploit it. It starts off well enough with Arnie being a bad ass in a bathhouse, losing his partner (McBain!) and being assigned to get the baddie (with some hot, emotionless sex with a fellow Russkie).

But then when the action goes to Chicago things go wonky. It takes far too long for Arnie to team up with the Chicago cop who is spectacularly uninteresting. I mean I guess Nick Nolte's character was uninteresting in 48 Hours but at least he had a girlfriend and inherent conflict against Eddie Murphy's character - cop vs crook and also (much less enjoyably) white vs black.

Here Jim Belushi is just a stock wise arse cop who plays by his own rules. So when Arnie comes over and plays by his own rules there's no conflict between them. Jim Belushi just doesn't like Arnie because he's Russian, which is crap, even in 1988, because the Russian is a cop taking down the drug dealer.

There are obvious places this could've gone to get the conflict - Belushi should've been a capitalist, who liked fancy clothes, or hated the Russians because of some Cold War thing (maybe his people were killed by Russians). But no - he thinks judges are too soft of crime, and crooks are bad... just like Arnie.

Also he doesn't bring anything to the party in terms of story - you could really cut him out of the whole film except for the last bit where he tips off Arnie where the baddy will be... but even this could've been done by someone else.

You think you're going to get some comedy of Arnie being tempted by a capitalist, free society - romance, religion, lots of money, nice suits, fantastic food... Have a girl try to seduce him. But nope they don't go for it.

So we're left with an unexciting story and some run of the mill action. It was a slog to get through.