Movie Essays

bellview--yep, i will watch anything   

Home | Movie Reviews | Video Roundups | Essays | Game Reviews | Subscribe | Mailbag | About | Search

"Tango & Cash"

3/6/05

If you're like me--and, you're like me if you are around 30, balding, enjoy the company of women and think steak is one of God's great gifts--then you know that every single time "Tango & Cash" is on TNT, you almost have to watch it to see the scene where our leads, Ray Tango (Sylvester Stallone) and Gabe Cash (Kurt Russell), storm the proverbial castle by driving a souped-up SUV straight through the front door of the bad guy's arms-dealing HQ.

It's not that the scene is a top-five all-time action sequence...this is hardly the case.  In fact, you pick out problems with it after each successive viewing--the fact that the explosions are so ridiculously canned that the filmmakers use some of the explosions over again, or that no one seems to be even remotely aiming at anything, but somehow T&C take out around 100 bad guys, or my favorite bit:  the SUV runs out of gas after literally four minutes of screen time.

No, you watch "Tango & Cash"--and, you love it--because it represents one of the final films of the 1980s and very early 90s largesse of big guns, big explosions, big tits, big stars action films, from "Rambo" flicks, to anything Schwarzenegger touched in the 80s ("Predator", "Commando", etc.), to the beginning of the Bruce Willis era to the "Lethal Weapon" films to more low-budget action flicks, which almost are too huge to list here (but, I'll throw in Seagal, Van Damme, Lundgren, straight-to-cable movies like the "American Ninja" series, even "Road House", to a certain degree).

"Tango & Cash" uses the tried-and-true buddy-cop formula to hilarious effect; Tango is the more conservative professional, been an LA cop for more than a dozen years, prides himself on work ethic.  "Armani with a badge" is how one cop describes him.  He is a superhuman with a handgun; to establish this, we get that horseshit scene at the beginning where Tango puts two bullets just past the ear of a baddie with his service revolver from about 100 yards away...while the bad guy is driving a 18-wheeler right at him while he's standing in the street. 

Cash is the polar opposite; goes with his gut way too often, always one step away from doing something completely ridiculous, the wiseass, the ladies' man.  As the two best cops in Los Angeles, T&C keep messing up the plans of big-time criminal Yves Terret (Jack Palance, who gets better every time I watch this movie) and to get them out of the way, Terret sets them up, getting them both arrested and thrown into a maximum-security California penitentiary.  After coming up with a plan to get out of prison to clear their names, they evade the police in exactly one scene--at the all-time mecca of 80s action flicks, a strip club--and start digging up the wherabouts of Terret's secret hideout.  They extract this information in one scene, then they roll in, blow everybody up, and go home happy.

There's so much to love in "Tango & Cash", I almost couldn't write it all down fast enough.  I had to rent the unedited version of the film to once again relive its glory...and, its glory is extensive.

How about the scene where Cash is chasing after an Asian assassin who tried to kill Cash by firing twice at point-blank range...only to be thwarted because Cash happened to be wearing his Kevlar vest on his way home from work that day?  During this scene, we get a gratuitous T&A shot of a couple boning in the backseat of a car in a parking garage during the chase (there's almost no reason to throw this into the film), we get a WHITE GUY doing the stunts for the Asian assassin, and we get a line where Cash, after arresting the assassin, actually says "I hate chasing after you karate guys", as if all Asians know karate.

We get Teri Hatcher, whose career can now be accurately assessed as such:

1. Made "Tango & Cash", playing an exotic dancer named Kiki.

2. Played Lois in that Superman series.

3. Won a Golden Globe for "Desperate Housewives."

Hatcher is dogshit in "Tango & Cash", but she is hot...so, I guess now I can see how she got that role in the Superman show.  Her relationship to Cash in the film was hokey, but their backrub scene is hilarious, almost as funny as maybe the best shot in the movie, when Cash leaves the strip club in drag.  (Cop to Cash and Kiki:  "Any chance at a threesome?")

The prison sequence, wildly underrated but, upon review, seriously classic.  How about the big black guy, one of the prisoners, to Cash as he enters the prison:  "Hey Cash, I'm gonna put brown sugar in your ass!!"  The fact that the prison is literally on fire in its hallways, which is never explained.  Or the presence of prisoner cells in the basement of the prison in the laundry room.  The male bonding during the torture sequence; you can almost feel Stallone acting by this time, as he pretends to care that his new buddy Cash is getting dipped in water tinged with electricity to the delight of the dirty prisoners.

"Tango & Cash" even has veteran bad guys at its disposal; James Hong, the bad guy from another big Russell project "Big Trouble in Little China", has been in over 100 movies, as has Brion James, most famously in "The Fifth Element" and a host of 80s flicks like "Red Heat", "48 HRS." and "Red Scorpion."  James plays Requin in "Tango & Cash", the Terret henchman that sells out the location of the bad guy HQ after Tango straps a freakin' grenade to his mouth (Cash:  "You want my vote for the Psycho Hall of Fame?  You GOT IT!!").

Naturally, there's the lines, which I had to take notes on, there were so many I had forgotten about in addition to the ones quoted above:

• Cop to Tango: "Who do you think you are...Rambo?"  Tango: "Rambo...was a pussy!"

• "Action.  Good old American action."

• "I think you need a little...iron in your diet!"

• "You get the feeling things are gonna get bloody?"

• And, of course:  Cash, wielding a revolver while Tango whips out a machine gun:  "Why is yours bigger than mine?"  Tango:  "Genetics...Pee-Wee!"

The most lasting audio clip from "Tango & Cash" is obviously F.U.B.A.R. (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition); over the years, movies haven't done a great job of incorporating things like this to guarantee their cult status, acronyms I mean.  It's one thing from the film that I thought would be copied ad nauseam, but it never happened, much like a "Tango & Cash" sequel, which was thankfully never made.  I'm still not sure if somebody came up with F.U.B.A.R. for the movie, or if it appeared in another popular work from the 80s or earlier...but, I have found nothing to make me believe that it is not a "Tango & Cash" original.  It only adds to the legacy!

Sure, the ending for the thing sucks...sure, I can't explain why any bad guy would set up a building-wide self-destruct mechanism for a warehouse full of readily-available black market machine guns...sure, I can't explain how Tango seems to have an unlimited supply of those goofy-looking spectacles, no matter what the situation is.  But, I know that I love you, "Tango & Cash"...and, I'll be seeing you on TBS, TNT or WGN real soon.

 

Random Bellviews, courtesy of Bell and Longer Community Trust:

• That first spring day:  Opening Weekend

• Memoirs of a Geisha:  $9.50 Show

• Spending $1.50 on a soda...and, getting a free song on iTunes:  Matinee

• 14-hour flights:  Rental

• Your #11 seed Virginia Cavaliers:  Hard Vice

 

justin@bellviewmovies.com