A couple of months ago, I met up with the cinephile friend I occasionally mention here over the Chinese New Year holidays. He asked to see the list of to-watch movies that I’d compiled and this was the entry that puzzled him the most. Is this that ’80s action movie starring Sylvester Stallone, he asked, why would you ever want to watch this? Indeed it is, and indeed it is a film that has a terrible reputation and deservedly so. But it’s also a film that exemplifies the excesses of the era like no other and that’s why this is an interesting film to watch.

Just from looking at the poster, you can tell that the studio was hoping to recapture some of the box office magic of Lethal Weapon, which was released only two years before. Except that instead of a good cop and a bad cop, we have in the words of the movie itself a bad cop and a worse cop, with the only real difference between the two being that Stallone’s Tango is rich and wears snappy suits while Kurt Russell’s Cash is crass and foul-mouthed. When the two wrecks the plans of the local crime lord one time too many, he hatches a plan to set them up and has them arrested. The two, who have never worked together before this, must then join forces to clear their names.

Reading through the Wikipedia page for this movie, it seems like its production was troubled from the very beginning. The producer wanted to be as campy and goofy as possible. The director, Andrei Konchalovsky who actually seems to have a very respectable body of work, disagreed and was eventually fired partway through the production. Between the replacement director Albert Magnoli, the editor that the studio insisted on bringing in and Stallone’s insistence on having control, it’s unclear who’s responsible for what. One thing’s for sure, this too-many-cooks problem resulted in a mess of a movie that has no idea what it’s going and has absolutely no respect for coherence.

And what a fount of silliness it is! The most visible example is how the final action sequence is an escalation of force that is completely out of whack with the rest of the movie. Whereas the action throughout most of the film is limited only to handguns, in the final scene the two manages to acquire an armored vehicle equipped with a 120 mm mini-gun. It then turns out that the crime lord has a small army at disposal, never mind that the film has never shown this or why he didn’t use this against the police, so they use it to go through the horde of mooks. There’s also how when Tango and Cash are sent into prison and the prisoners are somehow able to throw objects including bit of burning trash from within their cells. Or that despite being the most wanted men in the city, they seem to be able to make their way around Los Angeles just fine and even visit the LAPD’s research department (why does the LAPD even have such a department anyway?)

But the best bit of incongruity in the movie is easily the blatant homoeroticism. I mean I’ve complained before about critics reading too much into movies but this one has a scene in which Tango and Cash shower naked together all alone in a giant bathroom in the prison (and why would the guards leave them alone anyway?) Not only is the camera happy to film their bare asses side by side, the pair even reference in their dialogue about how they’re two naked men in the shower together! It really makes you see subsequent scenes like Russell in full drag costume and the two tightly grasping each other’s forearms in a different light.

It’s also unexpectedly a lot of fun to watch this as a parade of all of the worst action movie tropes. In the opening sequence, Tango stands firm while a truck barrels towards him and naturally it stops just a few paces short of hitting him. In one scene, the villains have our heroes disarmed and cornered, only to proceed to take them on one-on-one in unarmed combat. The official love interest, played by a very young Teri Hatcher, naturally turns up as the damsel in distress even if it has to be at the very last minute. Even the choice of supporting actors to play the villains makes for an interesting statement: Jack Palance, James Hong and Brion James. You’d be hard pressed to think of a trio that better represents the B-movies of a bygone era.

I’d never recommend that anyone watch this. I can’t even say that it falls into the so bad it’s good category. But it was amusing to watch and I did appreciate being reminded of how awful ’80s action movies could get and how I don’t miss them at all. This is one reason why I find the popularity of the Expendables franchise to be both puzzling and exasperating because who wants to resurrect all of that crap?