I’ve said a couple times in the past that, growing up, since my dad wasn’t really a Sylvester Stallone fan, I didn’t see much of the actor’s work. It’s been a little refreshing to discover he wasn’t just some dumb musclehead all the time. This was an actor with some real ambition that somehow got sidetracked into Rocky and Rambo. I don’t know that I would call myself a fan, but here we are. Stallone was a guy who wanted a bit more from his career than how it turned out.
But then we can pair him with Kurt Russell and we get one of the last movies from the 80s (unless you count 1990 as the last year of the 80s because there was no Year 0), namely Tango & Cash.
The two best detectives in Los Angeles are Ray Tango (Stallone) and Gabe Cash (Russell). They don’t work, and they don’t really like each other. Tango is uptight, a man comfortable in a nice suit with his own stockbroker. Cash is a slob with a, shall we say, fast-and-loose style of detective work. Both get results individually stopping drugs from coming into the city. They’re so good that each is responsible for major issues with crime lord Yves Perret’s (Jack Palance) drug empire. He wants them both gone, but rather than just have them both killed, he comes up with a plan to have the two framed for murder, sent to prison, and then killed. Does it make sense? Not really. Does it need to?
Also not really.
Tango & Cash is not the sort of movie that takes itself seriously. For all that Tango and Cash are rivals that don’t get along, their “not getting along” seems to amount mostly to tossing one-liners off at each other. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of animosity, just some kind of friendly rivalry. And that fits what sort of movie this is. This is a movie where Tango’s cell mate will threaten him with a slinky, but the cell mate is Clint Howard, so it doesn’t really work out too well. This is a movie where Cash has a nutty friend (Michael J Pollard because this movie has ALL of the character actors) who builds guns and booby traps that look like stuffed dogs with exploding heads. This is a movie where Teri Hatcher, as Tango’s kid sister, has some kind of dance number that involves wearing a bikini type outfit while playing the drums.
Essentially, this is a movie that is self-aware and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Newspaper headlines announce most of the major plot points as the movie progresses, and the last one, shown just before the closing credits, has a side headline that reads “Ask Not What The Critics Say” like it knew the reviews might not be that good. I can appreciate a sense of ironic self-awareness.
But is the movie good? Well, it’s fun, but still hits all the familiar plot points for the 80s action movie. There’s no reason for a warehouse to have a self-destruct system, but it does. How else would we get it to explode at the end? It’s fun, Palance is hamming up as only he could, and both Stallone and Russell do a good job with their basic Odd Couple character types. I largely dug it, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it a second time.
Grade: B-
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