Rewatching Tango and Cash
Kurt Russell enters the bustling police precinct wearing a dirty tank top, grabbing a pizza from a passing delivery guy. And that's after he got shot twice, jumped off the balcony, and chased the guy.
You know it's a good movie.
Last night, out of sheer curiosity, I decided to rewatch Tango and Cash, an action flick from 1989. Tango and Cash was one of the first action movies I remember watching; I don't know exactly how old I was, but I was younger than eight. The thing is—I only remembered explosions and a movie title for 30 years. NOTHING ELSE.
I expected a movie that would seem idiotic to my 39-year-old self, but, believe it or not, it has aged nicely. It's an absurd and illogical sequence of events, stitched together by a script with more plot holes than bullet holes. According to the reports, the production of Tango and Cash was a hellish nightmare, and many consider this movie a rip-off of Lethal Weapon, but if you ask me, it's much more than that.
Released in 1989, Tango and Cash is self-aware of its style and genre limitations, which proves to be its biggest strength or its downfall, depending on who you ask (and if someone says it's a downfall, don't believe them).
Instead of hiding the limitations above, the Tango and Cash scriptwriters (allegedly including Stallone, who was going crazy on rewrites because of his inflated ego at the time) decided to amp them up. That resulted in an absurd number of forgettable one-liners.
The music feels like a B- side track from some other action movie, total synth cheesiness unadjusted for the scenes it accompanies. As for the action itself, good God almighty, the testosterone oozes from every single shot, even in the scene when Kurt Russell goes full drag and actually pulls it off pretty respectfully and classy!
The leading cast, Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell, are both excellent. However, Stallone is hilariously comical, portraying a stylish cop who "deals with brokers" and is only in the cop world "for the action," in contrast to Russell's rule-breaking lunacy. Introducing Stallone's character's sister as Russell's character's love interest is a clear indication of why some of the most common millennial jokes are the sexual innuendos about moms and sisters.
Tango and Cash is a clear product of its time, a piece of exaggerated kitsch cinema that couldn't be shot or emulated today for a number of reasons, one of them being the total absence of this kind of action superstar.
I'm pretty happy that its existence in my memory banks is justified.
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