Chris has gone for an Arnie classic this week. Released in 1988, Red Heat arrived right in the thick of the buddy-cop boom, pairing Arnold Schwarzenegger’s granite-faced Soviet policeman with Jim Belushi’s wisecracking Chicago detective. Directed, co-written and co-produced by Walter Hill, the film sits somewhere between Cold War curiosity, action thriller, and odd-couple comedy, with Hill bringing his usual muscular, stripped-down approach to men glaring at each other near explosions. The cast also includes Peter Boyle, Ed O’Ross, Laurence Fishburne, Gina Gershon and Brion James, which is a very 1988 way of saying, “Yes, this will involve shouting in warehouses.”

Production took the film across Chicago, Los Angeles and Budapest, with Budapest doubling for Moscow, while the filmmakers were also granted approval to shoot establishing material in Moscow’s Red Square — noted by the AFI Catalog as a first for an American feature production. The film was released by TriStar Pictures on 17 June 1988, opening to just over $8.1 million domestically and finishing with around $35 million at the US box office. It may not have become the definitive Schwarzenegger classic, but it remains a fascinating VHS-era artefact: Arnie at peak stoicism, Belushi at peak “I’ve got a leather jacket and a comeback,” and Walter Hill trying to make Cold War geopolitics look like a bar fight.

Trailer Guy Synopsis

In a world divided by suspicion, steel, and extremely suspicious accents… one man is Moscow’s toughest cop. Ivan Danko follows the rules, respects authority, and has the facial expression of a locked filing cabinet.

But when a dangerous criminal escapes to the streets of Chicago, Danko is forced into the one partnership more unstable than international diplomacy: teaming up with Art Ridzik, a loudmouth American detective with a badge, a temper, and the dress sense of a man who has personally offended several department stores.

Fun Facts

• Red Heat was released in the same summer as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Die Hard, Big, Coming to America and Rambo III, making 1988 a fairly ridiculous year to compete for action and comedy attention.

• The film’s music was composed by James Horner, who also scored Aliens, Commando, Cocoon, Willow and, later, Titanic. So yes, this film exists in the same musical universe as both xenomorph trauma and Celine Dion-adjacent iceberg sorrow.

• Laurence Fishburne appears in the film before his major mainstream breakthrough in the 1990s, giving Red Heat a nice bit of “spot the future legend” VHS value.

• Gina Gershon also appears in an early role, years before becoming a cult favourite through films like Bound and Showgirls.

• The screenplay is credited to Harry Kleiner, Walter Hill and Troy Kennedy Martin, with Hill also directing and producing, because apparently just directing Schwarzenegger and Belushi wasn’t enough paperwork.

• The movie runs 104 minutes, which is a mercifully efficient length for a film that has to cover Soviet law enforcement, American policing, drug trafficking, culture clash comedy, and Arnold learning how to tolerate Jim Belushi.

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