Happy birthday to Sylvester Stallone, 70 years young today. At this late stage in his career, most of Sly's accomplishments have been widely acknowledged. Oscar nominations for acting and screenwriting for his star-making turn in Rocky; playing characters with names like Lincoln Hawk, Gabe Walker, and John Spartan in dumb action movies you can still see if you turn on FX at 2 a.m. on a Wednesday. And then—most recently and improbably of all—landing an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe win for playing Rocky Balboa, again, in last year's Creed.
But if you look at the inverse bell curve of Sly's career, there's one small peak that has been criminally under-sung: starring in the single greatest action scene of the '80s. It comes at the very beginning of the camp classic Tango & Cash, which—arriving in theaters on December 22, 1989—served as the ideal capper to a decade of Hollywood's ever-escalating arms race to see which studio could make the dumbest action movie.
"I just watched this metamorphosis," says Stallone of his Creed costar.
Tango & Cash stars Stallone and Kurt Russell as Ray Tango and Gabriel Cash, respectively—the two most decorated cops in the L.A.P.D., whose entire careers seem to be built around outshooting and out-quipping each other. But when Tango and Cash are both framed by a criminal mastermind, the rival cops are forced to work together to clear their names. Gunfights, explosions, Kurt Russell in a dress. You get the idea.
Despite its obvious appeal, Tango & Cash was largely neglected in its era—perhaps too '80s, in all its idiocy, for a country that would enter 1990 nine days after its release. But buoyed by recent, affectionate notices from websites like The Dissolve, Flavorwire, and Den of Geek—as well as a top episode of the popular bad movie podcast The Flop House—a small cult of devotees continues to flourish, and if you're not already a part of it, it's time to join.
How perfectly, joyfully stupid is Tango & Cash? Spend the next four minutes of your life watching the movie's opening scene—hosted, accurately, on a YouTube channel titled Best Movie Scene Ever. You will not regret it.
God. Where do you even begin? Robert Z'Dar's villain, whose big face is so integral to his character that the screenwriter just named him Face? That perfectly choreographed slow-motion shot of two dudes crashing through a windshield? Sylvester Stallone saying "Rambo… is a pussy" before he shoots a tanker truck, revealing that it's actually full of cocaine? I'm just going to embed it again, because I know you want to watch it again.
This intro is the Tango & Cash equivalent of a James Bond opening scene; though the tanker belongs to the film’s primary villain, and Face briefly reappears later in the movie, the scene itself has basically nothing to do with the movie to come. That means that the primary function of the scene is to set the tone for the movie—and in this case, that means tugging at viewers' sleeves like a seven-year-old hyped up on Pixy Stix, screeching "ISN’T THIS COOL?!?!?!" at a nonstop pitch for four straight minutes.
I should note that the big stunt itself is basically copied from Police Story, a similarly pitched Jackie Chan movie that arrived a few years earlier.
(For what it’s worth, IMDb's trivia section says Chan is "a good friend" of Stallone's, but I still can't figure out whether Tango & Cash was actually given the thumbs-up to steal from Police Story so shamelessly.)
Having seen this at least a dozen times, I still don’t really get what's going on with the special bullets Stallone puts in his gun before he starts shooting at the windshield—hollow points, maybe? According to the Internet Movie Firearms Database—an alarmingly comprehensive resource I just learned about today—the gun itself is a Smith & Wesson Model 36 Chief's Special. "He appears to be able to hit the windshield, and make a tight group, from a long distance, despite the poor sights on the gun," says the site, throwing some perfectly low-key shade at a movie that has no room for concerns like real-world logic.
But the action—wonderfully stupid as it is—is just a small part of what makes this scene so giddily watchable. The real joy is in the dialogue, which is so overheated you could fry ants with it. It's like screenwriter Randy Feldman was trying to win a bet over whether you could write an entire scene that was nothing but cheesy quips. And he fucking did it. "Glad you could drop in! [Stallone raises handcuffs.] You like jewelry?" "FUCK YOU." "I prefer blondes." Throw in that jazzy score by Harold Faltermeyer—much, much, much better remembered today for Beverly Hills Cop's "Axel F"—and you have a scene that could only be more '80s if the truck had a suction-cup Garfield attached to the windshield.
Most of all, there's Sylvester Stallone, admirably committed to some of the dumbest dialogue ever committed to paper. My one beef with the YouTube clip above is that it begins a little too late; when you actually watch Tango & Cash, the film begins with Stallone muttering "Let's do it" just before the scene begins.
He may or may not be in character. "Let's do it" seems to embody Stallone's overall approach to starring in Tango & Cash. You can’t make a movie this bad without committing to it, and Stallone is so utterly committed that he somehow makes it good. Happy birthday, Sly, and thanks for all the memories. Now please get started on Tango & Cash 2.