They say there’s no accounting for taste, but if newcomers to the action genre were using measurable data and certified statistics to try and inform their decisions on what constitutes a classic, then Tango & Cash wouldn’t come anywhere close to making the cut.
Of course, anyone with even the merest hint of appreciation for either the buddy cop formula or the brawn-and-biceps glory days of the 1980s will tell you in an instant that Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell’s over-the-top team-up is well worth watching at the first available opportunity, but it wasn’t exactly a widely-shared sentiment at the time.
Even now, Tango & Cash only holds a 31 percent Rotten Tomatoes score to go along with a shockingly underwhelming 58 percent audience approval rating, never mind the fact it landed a trio of Razzie nominations for Worst Actor, Worst Supporting Actor, and Worst Screenplay, even though it did manage to bring in $120 million at the box office.
More than 30 years on from its release, and action junkies on Reddit remain as incredulous as ever that Tango & Cash took such a critical pounding before being recognized by the awards ceremony that seeks to celebrate the worst Hollywood has to offer, which is an entirely fair and justifiable thought process when it endures as a deliriously cheesy and wondrously excessive ode to an era of blockbuster filmmaking that’s long since become defunct.
It sounds nuts, but celebrating Tango & Cash as the classic that it is flies in the face of the consensus, although we can safely say that everybody else is wrong in this instance; because it still rules.
Published: May 8, 2023 03:05 am