Investor Cop

Something interesting about Sylvester Stallone's character Ray Tango in "Tango & Cash" is the strait-laced personality he has. It seems that they were aiming for E.G. Marshall's character in "12 Angry Men": the rich, fastidious one. I guess Stallone was trying to play against type, to expand his range beyond the quiet tough guy roles he had played to that point. He doesn't look too bad in a nicely tailored suit and a pair of glasses, I'll grant him that.

He doesn't exactly pull off the role, though. I suppose he's not the absolute worst at it, but he's laboring against an awful lot in the process. In a lot of the movie, it seems as if they'd given up on the idea, and it's hard for him and Kurt Russell to gain any separation in personality from each other. It's just as well. They didn't need to play such opposites in order for there to be some nice tension between them, and there really is.

Besides how he plays it, Stallone's character doesn't make much sense. As a police detective, his salary is not much. It's known that he makes a lot of money playing the stock market, and he says he stays on the police force for "the action". That's a pretty implausible person they're asking me to believe in. I like him plenty, but I don't believe him. How long did it take him to amass a fortune based on the money he was able to invest from the tight budget that a cop would live on?

It doesn't matter much. I like Stallone when he does some of the little delicate gestures meant to suggest a well-heeled cop. Maybe he's not as ill-suited as I think to play such a role. He's smart enough to write a decent screenplay, and smart people don't have to sound very smart. I wish they could have exploited the idea a little better, but it was kind of fun. Criticizing it is really nitpicking considering how much I like the thing as a whole.