What a tall drink of water.
Here, Ritter and Belushi represent the two tentpoles of 80s American masculinity. Ritter’s the cushioned suburban yuppie who’s polite, hesitant, professionally successful but socially defanged. Belushi’s the all-purpose tough guy, a confident man’s man who’s dismissive of feelings, and constantly wants to be in control. One drinks diet soda, the other could kill a man with a milk carton.
Writer-Director Dennis Feldman, who also wrote Just One of the Guys, plays with exageration just enough to signal that it might be a self-aware satire at first, but what unfolds rarely goes subversion. Belushi’s character isn’t deconstructed so much as repeatedly validated. He’s the one who knows how the world works, and by the film’s end, Ritter’s been reshaped to match him. He becomes more decisive, more confrontational, more assertive. Not by growing into himself, but by absorbing the traits the film associates with being a “real man.”
It was the 80s, so the typical reward structure usually involved standing up for yourself, taking charge, and not overthinking. Sensitivity was fine, as long as you knew when to throw a punch between quiches. If you had to be a yuppie, at least be the kind that John Wayne would call ‘son’. Caring about your kid’s stolen bike didn’t make you less of a man. But getting it back made you a real one.
Beyond the taupe suits and the boxy cars, this movie is very 1987 – at times it does seem willing to lampoon those macho tropes, but it always lands squarely in their corner. It doesn’t question the idea of masculinity so much as reaffirm the version that was marketable in the 80s: charming when necessary, dangerous when required, and never apologising for either. -Pop
Real Men landed on home video in May of 1988, after a September 25, 1987 theatrical release.