Tango & Cash

Ultimately not as fun as one might’ve hoped, Tango & Cash follows the title characters (Sylvester Stallone’s Ray Tango and Kurt Russell’s Gabriel Cash) as they’re forced to clear their names after a vicious crime boss (Jack Palance’s Yves Perret) frames them for murder. There’s little doubt that Tango & Cash fares best in its fast-paced and thoroughly entertaining opening stretch, as director Andrei Konchalovsky, working from Randy Feldman’s screenplay, effectively establishes Stallone and Russell’s respective protagonists by delivering a pair of appreciatively over-the-top interludes (eg Tango takes down a hijacked tanker trailer using only a pistol). It’s clear, too, that the picture benefits substantially from the consistently irresistible banter between Tango and Cash, with both Stallone and Russell ably stepping into the shoes of their familiar yet thoroughly agreeable characters. (Stallone is solid as the uptight Ray Tango, though it’s ultimately Russell, at his charismatic best here, who stands as the movie’s most valuable player.) The film’s downfall, then, is a plodding second (and third) act mostly devoid of compelling set pieces or sequences, with, for example, the midsection’s heavy emphasis on the protagonists’ dull exploits within a maximum-security prison establishing an air of tedium from which it never quite recovers (although the climactic confrontation with Palance’s underwritten villain is actually not bad) – thus confirming Tango & Cash‘s place as an ineffective misfire that surely looked a whole lot better on paper.

** out of ****