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

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Look, just because something is old does not make it great. And yet, as the Point Break remake surfed into theaters on Christmas Day 2015, I do not recall running across a single article or review that failed to refer to the 1991 original, which paired Patrick Swayze with Keanu Reeves, as “classic” — noun or adjective. “Classic” is a charged word — one that should be earned rightfully vs. bestowed automatically.

Perhaps Swayze’s too-young passing in 2009 is responsible for the revisionist love, because Kathryn Bigelow’s crime flick was neither well-reviewed nor a hit in its July ’91 bow. In fact, its $8 million opening placed it in fourth that weekend, behind James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day, John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood and a reissue of a then-30-year-old cartoon, Disney’s 101 Dalmatians.

So, old? Definitely. Classic? Hardly.

With that out of that way, back to the “new” Point Break …

… and wow, does it suck. Seven years after witnessing (if not encouraging) the death of his dumbass bike-riding buddy (Max Thieriot, House at the End of the Street), extreme-sports athlete Johnny Utah (Luke Bracey, The November Man) has reinvented himself as an FBI agent. When a group of rogue extreme-sports enthusiasts use their extreme-sports skills to pull off a series of extreme heists, Utah is the only one who convincingly can go deep, deep, deep, deep undercover. After all, he’s got the extreme-sports know-how, the sleeve tats and, of utmost importance, the looks of what would result from The Fast and the Furious’ Paul Walker impregnating Sons of Anarchy’s Charlie Hunnam.

With the bureau’s blessing and armed with gun and surfboard, Utah takes off to infiltrate the gang, crack the case and bring ’em to justice … extreme justice. (Fun fact: According to one of the film’s posters, justice has no limit. Crime doesn’t, either, according to another. #themoreyouknow) Led by the Zen-ful Bodhi (Deliver Us from Evil’s Edgar Ramírez, too good an actor to endure haircuts as super-silly as he does here), the group operates under a Robin Hood agenda of wealth redistribution: Steal from the rich, make it rain on Third World countries. Bodhi’s crew members have names like Roach, Chowder, Grommet and Samsara, and welcome Utah into their bro-dude family with irony-free lines like, “What’s a motocross rider like you doing on a wave like that?” and “The only law that matters is gravity.”

Yes, Point Break is exactly that point-blank simpleminded, and its stupidity exhausts the viewer. Clearly cribbing more from the likes of Furious 7 than Bigelow’s big Break, it boasts some absolutely amazing stunt sequences that impart if not an adrenaline rush, then a solid contact high. Yet not even the best is worth suffering two hours plus of boneheaded dialogue and an unintentionally hilarious bumped-uglies subplot between Utah and eco-friendly earth child Samsara (Warm Bodies’ Teresa Palmer, suffering the further indignity of having her breasts pushed up to her neck). Invincible director Ericson Core (chosen for his extreme name?) is no Bigelow; while he can shoot leaping, jumping, running, falling and other action verbs all day, the man is forever crippled when it comes to mere walking and talking. —Rod Lott

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Before hitting it big (and inadvertently buying the farm) with The Crow, Bruce Lee’s son, Brandon, starred in the cheapo actioner Laser Mission, in which he plays American spy Michael Gold. He’s dispatched to encourage defection in Russian professor and laser weaponry expert Braun, played by Escape from New York-er Ernest Borgnine. (Unfortunately, at this point in Oscar winner Borgnine’s storied career, the Hollywood vet was believable only as a consumer of vast quantities of pastrami.)

As Prof. Braun disappears, the glittering Gold gets in deep with the Russian army and finds himself on the run, searching for the educator with the assistance of the prof’s daughter, Alissa, the blonde-haired, helium-voiced and breasts-forever-verging-on-escaping Debi Monahan (Wolfgang Petersen’s Shattered). Together, Michael and Alissa have a chase in a Volkswagen Microbus, shoot countless baddies with dead-on aim and bicker so much that the two are destined to become one (“That’s mister asshole to you!”).

Quite clearly, Lee possessed an easygoing charm that worked for him, although here, he acts largely through his tank top. Monahan has … well, I mentioned them already. For this action film saddled with a science-fiction title, director Beau Davis (Stickfighter) apparently could afford only one song, which they run into the ground: Knopfler’s “Mercenary Man.” (And sorry, but that’s David Knopfler, not Mark, so it’s not Dire Straits so much as just plain dire.) Faults and all, for five-and-10 adventure flicks that populate hundreds of public-domain DVD collections, you can’t do much better than Laser Mission. —Rod Lott

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The Towering Inferno, by the numbers:
• 138 stories, stands San Francisco’s brand-new Glass Tower
• 300 partygoers celebrating this massive erection — the world’s largest
• $2 million saved by going with electric wiring inferior to the architect’s specifications
• one fire caused as a result
• and nearly three hours of star-studded cheese piled eight Oscar nominations high! (Not to mention one crappy tie-in game for the Atari 2600 I nonetheless played endlessly in grade school.)

Directed by John Guillermin (King Kong ’76) and dedicated with a stone face and sans-serif typeface to our nation’s mighty firefighters, Inferno is producer Irwin Allen’s disasterpiece, outdoing his previous smash of The Poseidon Adventure. (As with that 1972 inverted enterprise, Allen entrusted himself to call the shots for Inferno’s “action sequences.”)

Charming as all fk, Paul Newman (The Sting) is the architect who goes above and beyond to save several soap-opera lives; meanwhile, a haircut-cursed Steve McQueen (Bullitt) is the fire chief who doesn’t show up until 45 minutes have passed. Ironically, the film’s first half is the best half, whereas once the blaze has spread to multiple floors and endangers the wealthy people cutting rugs in the penthouse, the rescue efforts play out twice as long as they should. And yet damned if I don’t tense up every time I watch Newman climb up and down an unraveled staircase railing, which hangs perilously over an open chasm.

The supporting cast reads like a Who’s Who of Airport passengers, even if some of them were not: William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Susan Blakely, Richard Chamberlain and two Roberts, Vaughn and Wagner. Among the various demises, Jennifer Jones (Beat the Devil) definitely gets the most cruel kiss-off, bouncing off a corner of the building on her way down. Her character was on a date with a lonely old man (Fred Astaire, Ghost Story), who at the end, in his charred tuxedo, is clearly disappointed not to find her waiting to continue their courtship. As a consolation, the tower’s head of security (O.J. Simpson, double murderer) hands the man her cat. Symbolism! —Rod Lott

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One year after The Incredible Hulk Returns debuted to huge ratings, NBC sent the not-so-jolly green giant to court — basically in name only — for The Trial of the Incredible Hulk. Just as cheap, rushed and unintentionally jokey as its predecessor, this telefilm follow-up promoted star Bill Bixby to the director’s chair as well. (All those episodes of Wizards and Warriors paid off! Next stop: Blossom!)

Both Bixby and Lou Ferrigno remain in the roles they originated — Bruce David Banner and Hulk, respectively — in 1978 for CBS’ long-running Incredible Hulk TV series. Shortly after Trial convenes, Banner is arrested for Hulking out on the subway to defend a woman from two thugs. Being a dirt-poor drifter, Banner is assigned a free lawyer. (Think back to when you were last arrested; you were offered the same deal.) Representing Banner is a blind attorney-at-law named Matt Murdock (Rex Smith, Transformations), who, as luck would have it, is also a superhero, spending his nights as Daredevil.

Yet as was the case with the less-than-mighty Thor in Return, this Daredevil is not quite the one we know and love from the decades of Marvel Comics. It looks as if they forgot to make the Daredevil costume and didn’t realize it until the day of shooting, and just covered him in black pantyhose to compensate. Despite such handicaps, he still kicks butt, and leaves his victims with a dose of goody-two-shoes advice like, “Read a book!” (All that’s missing is the Peacock network’s “The More You Know” tag.)

The woman Banner defended is kidnapped by the thugs’ secret evil organization, headed up by the Kingpin (rotund Raiders of the Lost Ark fan fave John Rhys-Davies), who flies away at the end in some crazy jet boat, representing one of the worst optical effects seen on prime-time TV. Oh, and other than a dream sequence that sees Hulk co-creator Stan Lee as a bewildered juror, no trial takes place. —Rod Lott

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