We’ll never see a decade for action cinema like the 1980s again, where musclebound meatheads dominated the genre through sheer strength and biceps alone. Arnold Schwarzenegger was arguably the defining hero of the time – unless you prefer the output of Sylvester Stallone – with Red Heat stating a case for the macho man’s most macho effort.
Right from the beginning of the film, which features a cavalcade of burly men wearing loincloths doing sweaty battle for reasons that are obviously integral to the plot, it’s made perfectly clear that this isn’t a film for what Schwarzenegger would refer to as “girlie men,” regardless of how poorly such a phrase has aged under a modern microscope.
Partnering up with Jim, the lesser of the two Belushis, Arnold’s hard-nosed Russian cop teams up with a red-blooded American male to track down and apprehend the drug dealer responsible for the death of both of their partners, adding some shared trauma into the mix so the odd couple duo can bond over blood, bullets, fists, and fighting.
Directed with typical grizzled panache by hard-boiled veteran of the crunching thriller Walter Hill, Red Heat has spent the last 35 years and change solidifying its reputation as a cult classic, which has been underscored one more time by the flexing of its muscles on streaming. Per FlixPatrol, the defiant tale of figurative d*ck-measuring is locked, loaded, and ready to unleash hell on the iTunes global rankings, where it’s even become the number one top-viewed feature in the United Kingdom out of absolutely nowhere.
