Tango & Cash

Who do you think is more intellectual, Sylvester Stallone or Kurt Russell?  Yeah I’m not sure either.  This was an important question that needed to be asked when they cast Tango & Cash though.  They also had to decide if it was going to be Tango and Cash, Cash and Tango, Tango & Cash or Cash & Tango.  I personally like that they went with the ampersand.

Buddy cop movies are a tradition that goes back to buddy westerns in my opinion like The Searchers.  Wait a second.  Did I just drag The Searchers into this?  Alright let’s forget about westerns and just focus on cop pictures.  Now I’m conflicted with these films because the action is usually pretty good but the unlikely partner match-ups are always such wise asses.  Both of them crack too many jokes and are too cartoony so like half the film is a comedy.  But it’s ironic that some of my favorite badass movies use the buddy cop formula like Die Hard with a Vengeance, Shakedown, Se7en, Marked for Death, Point Break, Training Day (even though the ending was trite, it’s still a cool movie) and Rising Sun (who the hell paired up Wesley Snipes and Sean Connery by the way?  They look so funny together.  And I bet that they didn’t say a word to each other off camera.  If you guys haven’t seen it, it’s a whodunit with a splash of sexy thriller thrown in that makes for an enjoyable viewing.  You know, there were a bunch of films made in the late 80’s and early 90’s that were sorta anti-Japanese or at least wanted to show that the Japanese weren’t as honorable and clean cut as they appeared to be like this, Black Rain, Gung Ho, Mr. Baseball and Showdown in Little Tokyo).  Tango & Cash is no exception to buddy cop movies and is definitely up there in showcasing both extreme action and extreme comedy (what, you’ve never heard of extreme comedy?).

So the movie starts with Stallone saying “ok, let’s do it” then some quirky music plays and the names “Tango” and “Cash” collide together.  They want to let you know that you’re in for some wacky shit and that these guys are gonna butt heads.  I found out recently that the opening scene that they use to introduce Tango was lifted from Police Story with Jackie Chan where he also stands in the way of a large oncoming truck/bus while aiming a gun at it.  It’s almost shot for shot too except Stallone fires his gun at the windshield and Chan fires his in the air.  But all bad guys fly through the windshield and onto the asphalt.  At this point Stallone says his third line in the movie, (or first formal line depending on how you’re counting) “glad you could drop in”.  If you had any qualms about what type of movie you were watching then this should settle things for you.  It’s going to be a long ride with a lot of cheesy jokes and one liners like this.  Now I’m all for one liners but it was like they were trying to break a record for cramming as many as they could into one film.  What I’m saying is that it gets annoying after the first fifty.  And it seems like Stallone has most of them too.

Stallone plays Ray Tango and he’s supposed to be the smart one.  But even though they put a pair of glasses on him, dress him in a suit and have him talk in a snotty manner with a slight upper crusty accent you can still tell that it’s Stallone.  Tango likes action and is just as bull headed as Cash but then that’s the point isn’t it?  That these two guys are more alike than they want to admit and everyone can see it except them.

We’re introduced to Kurt Russell as Gabe Cash by having someone try to assassinate him.  I like this intro better than Tango’s for two reasons.  First, it’s all Cash and no Tango so they’re not constantly yelling at each other and saying stupid shit.  Second, it’s a fairly long action scene that eventually leads to a cool car chase in a parking garage.  And like I alluded to before, Cash is the scruffy cop.  He eats burritos, wears jeans and a t-shirt, has longer hair and is supposed to be not as smart.  He’s supposed to be the more macho of the two.  But the problem is that Tango and Cash aren’t different enough.  All of the differences are in their appearance but not in the way they think or act.  They both want to kick some ass and are not afraid to get down and dirty.  Their approaches in achieving their goals are pretty much the same too except Tango is slightly more cautious.  Again, this is supposed to signal that Tango is the smart one and Cash is the dumb guy because he can’t wait a half a second longer for Tango to get on board.  But having Stallone wear suits and Russell wear jeans doesn’t make them different characters.  They need to approach situations differently and have traits that set them apart. 

Cash is more straightforward and is like a smarter but way less cooler version of Jack Burton from Big Trouble in Little China.  He can tell when someone’s messed with the sight on his gun but he also tortures the dude that tried to kill him so he doesn’t have much of a code.  Tango is like Peter Weller in Shakedown but even more irritating.  Actually I didn’t mind Weller in that movie so much because at least he’s a lawyer and is supposed to be a lame guy.  But Stallone just looks and acts like a buffoon in this.  We know he’s not really some Wall Street executive type.  He’s not fooling anyone.  But the worst part about these characters is that nothing ever really seems to bother them.  Even after they’re tortured they can’t help but crack some fucking jokes.

Of the two I think Tango is the worse character.  He’s certainly more annoying and one smug motherfucker.  He acts like such a prude and always thinks he has a better answer for solving a problem than Cash.  And that’s why buddy cop movies are usually really dumb because each cop has to constantly prove that they know more and have the better plan than the other cop.  The constant barrage of jokes and one liners is about one-upmanship, that their way is the right way and the other guy’s way is wrong. 

But it’s not all bad.  There are some good action scenes that standout like the laundry room prison fight and the last humungous battle scene.  Jack Palance (City Slickers, Batman (1989)) as the main villain is really good too.  I especially like the monologue he gives about Tango and Cash battling his drug operation and the plan he has for bringing them down.  Also, Robert “holy shit I can’t believe that face exists in real life” Z’Dar (Maniac Cop) makes a very memorable appearance as a henchman and even gets his own fight scene.

Andrey Konchalovskiy directed this and people will probably know him from Runaway Train.  Now that was a kick ass buddy film (seriously guys it was great, you should watch that).  He was replaced by Albert Magnoli though who’s known for writing, editing and directing Purple Rain.  So because there were two directors that worked on this film it might explain why it has a weird feel to it.  When there’s action it’s dead serious and Palance’s scenes are serious too.  But there’s so much ball breaking between Stallone and Russell that your mind has to constantly switch gears to comedy.  It’s not like other action movies where there are only some jokes or a comic relief character pops up now and again.  With this movie it’s like they blended the main hero and the comic relief together and then made two of him.

Even though I was hard on this film I still like it and would recommend it but with a warning because it’s on the verge of being an action movie spoof.  But there’s plenty of macho attitude to go around, Kurt Russell isn’t totally annoying, Jack Palance is good, I love that there’s a whole prison part, Stallone and Russell are actually together on screen for most of the movie and all of the effects and stunts were done without CGI.  Even a not-so-great-but-not-bad-either movie like this was made before all action was done with computers so that’s a big plus.  But maybe people will start to do stuff for real again and use computers less like they did in Fast Five.  But then again I’m not gonna hold my breath. 

The temptation of seeing a movie where Stallone and Russell get equal billing as leads that was made in the 80’s is too much to pass up.  It’s just too bad that they had to make their characters so dumb and that they had to throw in so much comedy.  They didn’t totally miss their opportunity here but they certainly didn’t maximize it.  I really like the title though.  Picking two arbitrary words and putting an ampersand between them makes for endless possibilities of badass movie titles.