Literally the last action film of the ’80s, the Guber-Peters Company buddy copper Tango & Cash seemingly rounds up every element that defined the genre that decade, and packed them into the first 10 minutes. To wit: Renegade cops! Guns! Car chases! Cocaine! Tits! Mullets! Mullets!! Mullets!!! Complete and total disregard for life, limb and property! Russian comic relief! The snyth-pop music of Fletch’s Harold Faltermeyer! The scary-potato face of Maniac Cop Robert Z’Dar!
Okay, so I lied. All that can be found in the first nine minutes. Only upon closer scrutiny do we notice the absence of two things: running/jumping from an explosion and a slice of beefcake via a hunk’s bare buns. Rest assured, both “rear” their heads before director Andrei Konchalovsky (Runaway Train) ends the film — in a freeze-frame of a high-five, natch.
Respectively coming off Lock Up and Tequila Sunrise, Stallone and Russell respectively play rival cops Lt. Raymond Tango and Lt. Gabriel Cash, respectively buttoned-up and a loose cannon. Both winners in the war on drugs — or at least as far as their L.A. beats are concerned — the men are framed for murder by rat-loving criminal kingpin Yves Perret (Jack Palance, playing his character as if he were still in Tim Burton’s Batman), simply to move the story forward and give Tango and Cash something to do — namely, go to prison, simply so Tango and Cash can break out of prison. You get the picture; its idea of audience-pleasing comedy is dressing Russell in drag and having Stallone declare that “Rambo is a pussy.” Ha, get it?
At once as familiar and embarrassing as a lunch of SpaghettiOs, Tango & Cash does sport a couple of surprises, the first being that our heroes are like James Bond in that they have their own Q, as savant-as-ever Michael J. Pollard (Bonnie and Clyde) constructs such useful gadgets as the guns that pop out of Cash’s cowboy boot heels. Speaking of 007, future Bond girl Teri Hatcher (Tomorrow Never Dies), in an early role as Tango’s troubled kid sister, Kiki, proves to have quite the impressive stripper moves. She also may be the screen’s only clothes-peeler to a perform a drum solo in the middle of her routine. Well-played, Ms. Hatcher, well-played.
Kiki’s rhyming throwaway comment of “grime, crime and slime” nearly could be Tango & Cash’s plot synopsis, but definitely works as a tagline for this high-calorie high colonic of a movie. Same goes for Tango’s utterance of “good old American action,” because no one makes mindless violence as the USA. USA! USA! USA! US — whaddaya mean Konchalovsky was born in Moscow? No wonder this production was so troubled. —Rod Lott