TANGO & CASH
With Sylvester Stallone, Kurt Russell, and Jack Palance.
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The penis, when in the hands of an actor, never amounts to much more than comic relief, even when it is only wielded metaphorically. Though the penile jousting in Tango & Cash is merely verbal, this tale of two boyish cops on the trail of a punitive crime lord is straight out of the junior-high locker room–a $25 million fantasy of male pubescent fear and adolescent power, right down to the tenor of its dialogue and its perverse imagery. Even though it is full of the labored wisecracks that inhabit all bastard children of 48 HRS., it is not clear that this movie knows how hilarious it is. Director Andrei Konchalovsky might have scattered comically overstated camera angles here and deliriously baroque compositions there as clues, but since an argument with Stallone led to Konchalovsky’s exile from the production before it was finished–no glasnost in Hollywood–we cannot know with certainty exactly what footage the talented Russian emigre supervised. We end up with a loony curiosity, a hodgepodge of neuroses masquerading as a good time, anxiety trying to pass itself off as daring, and puberty pretending to be manhood.
In days when Joseph Campbell perches on the best-seller lists and Indiana Jones goes to war with his father, these dime-store Jungian baubles would be gaudy enough. Given the overblown treatment they get in Tango & Cash, it’s positively mortifying.
