Review of Tango & Cash (1989) by Scott J — 29 May 2008

A (very) poor man's "Lethal Weapon". Typical buddy cop one-liners and jokes (we get it, they're like opposites, right?) that are almost as cheesey as the plot. Jack Palance might've raised the bar for stereotypical old, powerful bad guy role as a Super Villan drug lord.

(Note: his "fortress" is an old abandon air base surrounded by construction equipment and he has an odd affection for mice. Oh, and has one of those setups with the 16 or so TVs stacked on top of each other -- 4x4 -- so it can play one image but it's broken up evenly over the different TVs to seal the deal and let you know that this guy is powerful and probably evil).

Anyway, Super Villan Jack Palance frames Super Cops Tango (Sly Stallone, the "stock broker" ) and Cash (Kurt Russell, the wild cop with a mullet and cowboy boots -- more on these later). The Super Cops go on trial, go to jail, break out of jail, kill the bad guys all in the course of what seems like a week.

Really. It might've even happened in about 5 days. Oh, and Stallone and Russell probably couldn't have been more in love with themselves when they made this. The action and stunts are over the top and unbelievable, which is good if you're looking for a laugh.

Besides watching this dated (Could the late 80s/early 90s been more superficial, glossy and over the top? I say no.) flick for the simple joy of ripping on it, here are a few other highlights: Clint Howard has a small role (it makes me smile when I know that Ron's little bro got a paycheck); the toupee of bald character actor Geoffrey Lewis; the always solid James Hong (who pretty much plays every role in Hollywood that calls for elderly Asian man, usually evil or wise Asian men, but surprisingly wasn't in Gremlins.

That was Keye Luke.); Kurt Russell's ridicously awesome gun boots. Yes, his boots can kill you!; Russell's mullet, which looks like it took about a can of styling moose to tame; and a soundtrack with bad synth music that was left over or rejected from the Beverly Hills Cop movies.

A young Teri Hatcher is also in this schlockfest and she is nice to look at, but that might come across as sexist, so forget I said that. One other tidbit is that the Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky also directed Whoopie Goldberg and James Belushi in "Homer and Eddie".

Now you can die.