Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Tango & Cash!

May we all have as much fun at our respective trials.

Few genres are as uniformly mediocre as the 80s buddy cop flick, in which an odd couple of cops (or one cop and one crook, etc.) team up and bicker over differences until they learn a valuable lesson and defeat the villains of the day. Most iterations had a black guy and a white guy, and ranged from benign pleas for us to all-just-get-along to, well, Lethal Weapon 2.

This movie is why South Africa now has 70 murders a day and a government that proudly declares it doesn't have to provide its people electricity if it doesn't want to.

Others made the difference in backgrounds something else, like Red Heat (American cop meets strongman late-stage Soviet cop) or overlooked 90s variant Showdown in Little Tokyo (ethnically Japanese cop meets ripped weeaboo cop). Finally the genre mutated into prestige HBO drama with True Detective (good ol' boy chudjak meets fedora nihilist), with strangely kino results.

Spoilers: this show trolled atheoids so hard by making their Shadow the Hedgehog stand-in the coolest guy ever and the nominally Christian hypocrite a weak-willed slob only to have the fedora find Christ in the last scene. Neckbeards still jiggle with rage-filled sobs about it to this day.

But it is 1989's forgotten populist masterstroke, Tango & Cash, that most classically hearkens back to the original odd-couple formula, with the snob-meets-slob dynamic at its core. Sylvester Stallone gamely sends himself up as an erudite, fashion-conscious cop who plays the stock market and calls his own Rambo character a pussy, while Kurt Russell is his rough-around-the-edges foil, who spends most of the movie hitting on Stallone's sister (Teri Hatcher, Tomorrow Never Dies). 

Mid female lead of 1989 (colourised).

The plot is simple: supercops Ray Tango (Stallone) and Gabe Cash (Russell) get framed by arch-villain Jack Palance after interfering once too often with his drug empire. They're sent to live in general population in a maximum security prison full of scumbags they've previously busted.

Soap-dropping jokes are made.

Our heroes receive a warm welcome to the big house.

This shot says a lot about the duality of man.

Never mind that we've clearly seen that they're guilty of violations both technical and egregious, including brutality that would make Dirty Harry raise an eyebrow, which Palance could easily have leveraged against them. The movie breezily skips over that little detail, perhaps because the script was being constantly rewritten on the fly during a troubled production presided over by giant-spider-in-Superman-demanding Hollywood folktale Jon Peters.

The end credits freeze-frame literally telling you to disregard objections to the nonsensical plot would be a red flag if the movie weren't so much fun.

Realising their days are numbered, the eponymous duo break out of prison and begin pursuing their revenge against Palance's minions, including Requin (Brion James), who shrugged off the shackles of a stock role as scripted to make his character speak solely in Bri'ish clichés.

Actual dialogue.

Finally, with help from a shameless ripoff of James Bond's Q, Cash and Tango storm Palance's hideout and defeat him, owing largely to Palance and Requin's classic bad-guy blunder of forgetting to announce they have a hostage until after their small army of faceless thugs are already dead.

In another blatant Bond nod, Palance has pet mice. However, while Blofeld just idly strokes his cat while dealing with his underlings, Palance really seems to adore his little pets.

Tango & Cash was the last movie released in the 1980s and feels like the perfect sendoff to an era. As uneven, derivative and poorly paced as it may be, it's completely satisfying entertainment. The whole movie is peppered with male bonding banter that could kill the tone like Marvel's jokes-per-minute mandate, but it never does because it is the tone and is completely unselfconscious about it. Watch this movie; you will grin like a tard from beginning to end.