MOVIE REVIEW : Soviet ‘Dirty Harry’ Hits Chicago Streets in Flashy ‘Red Heat’

What price glasnost ? In “Red Heat” (citywide), director-co-writer Walter Hill gives us a really bizarre variation on the urban crime melodrama, a genre in which Hill himself (“The Warriors,” “48 HRS.”) is one of the modern masters.

This is a Soviet-fish-in-American-water cop thriller with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a Russian Dirty Harry: Ivan Danko, a hard-nosed, Moscow cop with a fierce disregard for liberal niceties, sent to Chicago after a scummy Russian drug smuggler who killed his best friend.

“Red Heat” is directed in a fiery, muscular, pop-graphic style. And it has a James Horner score that puckishly mixes Prokofiev and rhythm and blues. But it’s also a movie with a cramped interior. The action scenes seem to be squeezing out everything else, pressing the characters against the wall.

Occasionally, they press back. Schwarzenegger is one movie star who can look convincingly superhuman on screen--and here he seems like a monolith on the prowl, with a Frank Frazetta frame and features. He’s played off against Jim Belushi as Art Ridzik, a wisecracking Chicago cop who’s also had his best friend killed. (Buddyhood is a dangerous occupation in this genre.) It’s a good match-up.

Schwarzenegger--whose words are like hammer blows--is one of the tightest-looking actors around, and Belushi is one of the loosest. Sloppy-mouthed, floating-eyed, devil-may-care, casually profane, he has a ripe comic style that suggests Bill Murray as much as his late brother, John Belushi.

As in “48 HRS.,” Hill matches a gloweringly intense, tough, moralistic hunk with a joking, resourceful street-jiver and sets them after a murderous sociopath: cocaine comrade Viktor Rostavili (Ed O’Ross), an alleged “Georgian” tough guy who’s like a rabid dog with a five o’clock shadow.

Belushi isn’t playing a crook-cop, as Eddie Murphy was. But, of course, in Danko’s eyes, Ridzik is something of a miscreant, an agent of a corrupt capitalistic system. And, to Ridzik, Danko is a repressive bully, an agent of Communist tyranny.

The movie twists up these expectations. Danko is a harder-line law-and-order man than Ridzik--who quotes the Miranda ruling. And at one point, the stern Muscovite half-jokingly suggests the Soviet and American cops band together and kill the politicians: A worldwide Police State vision that isn’t exactly reassuring.

The film begins in a cavernous Moscow, partially shot on the Red Square (and in Budapest), and rapidly switches to a wide-open Chicago. Hill--along with co-writers Harry Kleiner (“Bullitt”) and Troy Kennedy Martin--mixes up cartoon images of right and left, collides them against each other, then suggests, somewhat unconvincingly, that these opposed systems can be bridged on a human level by like-minded pros. Yet, the movie also suggests that West is West and East is Eastwood and never the twain shall meet. It’s laced with inside references to “Dirty Harry,” and, at one point, Danko turns down Harry’s favorite weapon, the .44 Magnum, in favor of a Russian model.

Hill likes to strip down and streamline his stories: make them heavily schematic or even--as in “The Driver”--allegorical or symbolic. But here, he sets up the symbols and then doesn’t clash them. The movie would be better if it were more focused on Danko and Ridzik, less on the carnage around them.

We don’t get a real sense of the men mellowing toward each other, and there seem dozens of missed opportunities for Danko and Ridzik to interact, for Danko to discover the curious, cracked culture of Chicago, for hostilities and rapprochements to develop. We’re missing all those little character touches and human eccentricities that would have made “Red Heat” a truly memorable movie--instead of just another super-professional car-crash-gunfight festival, climaxing in a loony high-concept battle of dueling buses.

This isn’t necessarily failure of nerve. Hill usually gives blacks prominent roles in his movies--and he’s included a scalding speech from the black Marxist prison kingpin (Brent Jennings) who masterminds the drug ring. But though he tweaks at some sensitive nerves, the politics and social background, both Soviet and American, are slicked up and over-simplified.

Hill--a film maker with major gifts and a sometimes maddeningly casual attitude toward his use of them--seems to fall too easily into trends and conventions that sabotage his own movies. For its genre and audience, “Red Heat” (MPAA-rated R, for language, partial nudity and violence) is above average.

But it doesn’t expand outside those murderously confining big studio bloodbath conventions. It doesn’t have the human levels and depth that Hill put into movies like “Southern Comfort” and “The Long Riders.” Like Danko or Ridzik--even like Victor or the black Marxist drug dealer--Hill seems trapped within a system that’s hurling him into slick carnage. Unfortunately, in this case, he and his film-making buddies can’t shoot their way out of it.