TANGO & CASH 1989
31%
Directed by Andrey Konchalovskiy
Written by Randy Feldman
Starring Sylvester Stallone, Kurt Russell, Teri Hatcher, Jack Palance
Synopsis
Hot-shot LAPD detectives Ray Tango and Gabriel Cash get results until a local kingpin frames them for the death of an FBI agent. Never exactly friends, Tango and Cash must team up to clear their names.
Why We Love It
Tango & Cash is a movie as much in a war with itself as the bickering title characters are with each other. That tension produces a fascinating, if failed, comedy/thriller.
Chasing the Lethal Weapon lucre, producer Jon Peters sought to make a film more over-the-top than Warner Bros.’ buddy-cop success. Director Andrey Konchalovskiy, however, saw the movie differently and tried to strike a more realistic feel. The result is a clash of tones: actors like Jack Palance, Z-grade movie legend Robert Z’Dar, and Brion James reach for the B-movie rafters as Sylvester Stallone as Tango and Kurt Russell as Cash attempt—at least in certain scenes—to give their characters some depth.
The notion of realism disappears almost entirely once Tango and Cash end up on trial, though. From that point on, the film tries to outdo itself with each successive action set piece or alleged “comedy” sequence. By the point Tango and Cash ride dump trucks through an exploding quarry to fight the bad guy, you may forget the grittier moments in the prison just forty-five minutes earlier. (A scene in which Tango overhears his sister, played by Teri Hatcher, tending to Cash’s wounds and assumes they’re having sex is as unfunny as it sounds. And more out of place than that.)
For their parts, Russell and Stallone are solid because they essentially play themselves. Yes, they start out the film delivering actual “performances,” but at some point both actors accept that the audience just wants to see them escape explosions with the same spirit as Riggs and Murtaugh. It just about works whenever you can see their faces—they were some of the biggest movie stars in the world at the time—but an alarming number of scenes feature just the back of the characters’ heads while the actors offer some unfunny quips added during post-production.
They also quip in close-up, with Russell doing his best to sell some seriously unfunny lines. The lead characters’ love of yuks undercuts any of the jeopardy and tension Konchalovskiy hoped to create, but it also gives the film a giddy quality as it tries to force its audience into laughing. Humor finally happens, just not in the form Konchalovskiy or Peters intended. Instead, Tango & Cash leaves you chuckling from all the ways it fails to be what its creators wanted.