The Arnold Schwarzenegger Collection
Whenever I see Arnold Schwarzenegger in his muscle-bound prime, I can’t help thinking of Clive James’s image of him as a ‘brown condom stuffed with walnuts’. With put-downs like this, a lesser man would have been stopped dead in his tracks, but Arnie, of course, proved as relentless as The Terminator’s indestructible killer cyborg.
Released on DVD today, the four films in The Arnold Schwarzenegger Collection illustrate the actor’s inexorable rampage through 1980s Hollywood. The movies are a mixed bag, but they do show how a heavily accented bodybuilder from the Austrian boondocks turned from a joke into a major star.
Schwarzenegger flexes his muscles, if not his acting skills, in Red Sonja (1985), a piece of sub-Conan sword and sorcery piffle about the quest for a magic talisman. If this were a comedy, then Schwarzenegger would be playing second banana to Brigitte Nielsen’s titular swordswoman. Sadly, the film is so dire that even unintentional laughs are few and far between.
The Austrian Oak does keep his shirt on, at least most of the time, in the so-so action thriller Raw Deal (1986). He plays a former FBI agent who goes undercover to infiltrate the Chicago mob and gets to deliver a few cheesy one-liners, even if he does mangle the unspeakable line: “He molested, murdered and mutilated her.”
He fares better in Red Heat (1988), Walter Hill’s reworking of the mismatched buddy action movie formula from 48 Hrs. Here, his po-faced delivery is perfect for the role of a Soviet policeman who teams up with James Belushi’s wisecracking Chicago cop in the pursuit of a drug-smuggling gang.
But the best movie of the bunch, by far, is Total Recall (1990), Paul Verhoeven’s ultra-violent sci-fi thriller based on Philip K Dick’s mind-bending story, ‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale’. This time, he’s a late-21st-century construction worker who unlocks (or does he?) his secret past as an intergalactic spy. Schwarzenegger gets to throw his weight around, of course, but he’s on better form here because he also shows a vulnerable side. Who’d have thought, at the outset of his career, that we’d see Arnie as an everyman, and not just a super-sized, invincible hero.
