It is now October and Arnold Fest 2009 should have ended. However, Arnold is too big to be contained in a single month alone! That, and I have a few more reviews that I never got to post during September so Arnold Fest will be extended for a few more days. Yay! Who knows? You may see it again in 2010!
It never ceases to amaze me how much ass Arnold can kick. I have seen a ton of Arnold movies, but each time I watch one, or watch one again, I am always excited and blown away by how much ass he kicks. And that my friends, is what makes a true action star.
Raw Deal is about a cop, Kaminsky (Arnold), who fakes his own death to go under cover as a mobster, Joseph P. Brenner, in order to bring down their whole operation. When you ask Arnold to do a job, he freakin’ does the job well. He gains the mob’s trust well enough to start working for them and then he freakin’ kills them all! And by kill them all, I mean he single handedly goes to their hangouts and kills them in big groups. Just Arnold verses a butt load of guys, which is usually how his movies turn out.
Raw Deal has a lot of moments when you think, “Now that’s how you do it.” For instance, Kaminsky’s wife bakes him a cake and decorates it in icing with the word sh** and then goes on to throw it at him and it splats on the wall. Now that’s how you bake a cake!
There’s one scene where some mobsters are doing a drive by, only it’s not in just some car or van they had. It is in a school bus of death, complete with tinted windows and guns sticking out of every one of them. Now that’s how you do a drive by! Who is going to argue with a school bus with 20 guns sticking out the window? A dead person, that’s who.
Another scene involves a mobster pretending to be a bomb squad member. He first calls in a bomb threat and then goes in to “diffuse” the bomb. Now that’s how you get business! You don’t just sit around waiting for someone to make a bomb threat, you make your own. There are plenty of learning opportunities from Raw Deal. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.
Raw Deal is very enjoyable. It’s not one of the more well known Arnold movies, at least it wasn’t for me, but it kicks some butt. There is a lull in butt kicking in the middle of the movie when they are trying to set up plot and all that other crap, but it starts early with action and it ends with an awesome sequence of Arnold taking out everyone by himself. So this is a good one to watch for your next Arnold night or action movie night. But be careful about drinking and baking while you watch this movie.
Time until action: ~ 2 minutes
Baddies: The Mob led by Luigi Patrovita (Sam Wanamaker)
Best Line: “You should not drink and bake.” You have to see how Arnold delivers this line and the context from which it came. It’s also very sound advice. Drinking + baking equals waking up to a burned hand and 12 dozen cookies with phallic shapes drawn on them with icing sitting all over the house and stuck to the walls. You will be finding cookies in the oddest of places for months to come. Mmmm, cookies!
Best Kill: This kill actually has nothing to do with Arnold, but it was just so darn good. A baddie gets a witness who was going to testify against the baddie and sits him in a chair facing a mirror. He says, “So you want to be a witness? Witness this!” As the witness is looking in the mirror, he sees the baddie put a gun to the back of his head and BAM! He blows his brains out. The guy actually got to witness his own murder. I’m so happy for him. Not many people can say that…well, no one can say that because their dead.
Best Explosion: Kaminisky (Arnold) needs to fake his own death in order to infiltrate the mob as Joseph P. Brenner. Kaminisky drives into some kind of junk yard with all sorts of flammable tanks and barrels lying around. He parks his car between two towers, like water towers only these have the word “Flammable” written on them. He lets the contents from within run out onto his car and then he shoots a flare to ignite it. The car blows up, then the two towers blow up. As if that wasn’t big enough, hundreds of stacked barrels blow up next and the explosion is just huge.
Action Rating: 3 ½ “Poop” cakes for Arnold, out of 5
Illustration by Alex Langley. Rocket Llama World Headquarters
This is the Action Flick Chick, and you’ve just been kicked in the ass!
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I love the ending when he insults his crippled cop boss into walking again- none other than Darren McGavin, Dad from A Christmas Story / Kolchak the Night Stalker.
Awesome! I see you found the amazing, Raw Deal! Ya know, this is the movie that made me want to be a critic. I saw this with my dad when it first came out, and we were super jazzed walking out of the theater. I turned to my old man, just to goad him and said, "Hey dad, what do you think the critics gave that one?" He looked into my face and said, "F#$k the critics! What the hell do they know anyway? Anything we like, they hate, odds are if they like it, I will hate it." Thus, the seeds to Rick Swift were sown.
You captured everything I loved about this movie, right down to the best line and the best kill. There is even a bit of good drama with the late Darren McGavin towards the end that I really thought was awesome when I was a kid. Granted, Arny doesn't really carry the scene that well . . . oh, God, I sound like a critic – someone taze me, NOW!
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