Schwarzenegger Gives Everybody A Raw Deal

It’s been at least a couple of decades since I’ve last seen Arnold Schwarznegger’s 1986 star vehicle Raw Deal…mainly because it was one of those rare Arnie flicks where I was bored crapless. In hindsight it’s not as bad as I remembered, with a winning, wise-cracking performance by the Austrian Oak, a slickly photographed style courtesy of Cliffhanger photographer Alex Thomson and tons of R-rated violence.

But it still doesn’t work as a whole and it was lucky Schwarzenegger got this little experiment out of the way very early in his action career. After this the big man stuck to high concept plots rather than the tired Mob/revenge drama here and he wisely shunned stories involving mundane family drama (until he got to flops The Sixth Day and Jingle All The Way). John Irvin’s direction is static and unremarkable, The wanky guitar score corny and distracting and the editing comatose and the overall tone comes off like a late-70’s TV movie rather than a cutting edge bullshit action movie. Not bad but best left forgotten.