Raw Deal (1986)

Raw Deal arrives from 1986, a Schwarzenegger vehicle in which the star plays a disgraced FBI agent turned North Carolina sheriff who fakes his own death in an oil company explosion and infiltrates the Chicago Outfit. The film's cultural ledger is close to blank. The cast is white and male to a man, with women positioned as an alcoholic wife who resents the rural quiet and a casino employee who exists to hand over keys and cash. Neither gets a thought of her own, and the screenplay does not appear to notice the omission.

There is no racial theme, no environmental conscience, no class critique. The antagonists are gangsters, not corporations, and the hero's reward for dismantling them includes a duffel bag of mob money passed to a woman so she can start over. No LGBTQ presence. No neurodivergent characterization. No engagement with history, revisionist or otherwise. This is a mafia vendetta picture played inside a white ethnic-crime milieu, and it stays there with a kind of grim contentment. The body on display is the star's, celebrated as an instrument of violence, which sits at some distance from any modern conversation about bodies.

The film does not lecture. It has no message to deliver and no interest in delivering one. Critics of the era noted the muddle of the plotting and the sheer volume of the body count, and Pauline Kael found it both reprehensible and enjoyable, which remains the most efficient summary available. The result is a lean, ugly, occasionally effective machine for mayhem, and it makes no apology for the pleasure it takes in that. As a document of social consciousness it is very nearly a null set. As evidence that 1986 held different priorities, it is exhaustive.