Every Arnold Schwarzenegger Movie Ranked Worst To Best

20. Red Heat

Red Heat
TriStar Pictures

Walter Hill was the granddaddy of the buddy cop genre. The writer and director kickstarted the entire trend with .48 Hrs - the film that launched Eddie Murphy's film career - and returned to the niche with 1988's Red Heat, a Cold War action-comedy that paired a Soviet cop with a Chicago detective. The former role was inhabited by Arnold Schwarzenegger, while the latter was brought to life by James Belushi.

While thoroughly watchable and replete with some all-timer Arnold moments (especially the "cocainum!" bit), Red Heat is no .48 Hrs, with Hill deploying all the expected trappings of an "East meets West" story without the chemistry or action to mitigate the lack of invention. Ivan Danko is certainly one of Schwarzenegger's more memorable characters, and it's entertaining in a way you'd expect any eighties Arnie film to be, but Red Heat itself is far from his top tier.

Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.