God DAMN that song is good. In honor of this momentous occasion, let's examine a small but illustrious subgenre in cinema: the action movie where someone's shitty driving leads someone else (or themselves) to attribute same to Stevie Wonder having been his instructor. You see, because Stevie's blind. Ya know.
It's kind of a lazy joke but can be made to work in the right circumstances. Two examples:
Eddie Murphy in Delirious, having a hypothetical conversation with Stevie, while Eddie's miming driving a car: “The piano and the singing . . . I told you how I feel about the singing. I ain't impressed. You want to impress me? Take the wheel for a while, motherfucker.”
Bruce Willis in Die Hard, watching Reginald Veljohnson doing a very leisurely donut outside the Nakatomi building while Alan Rickman, Alexander Gudonov, et al are ripping shit up inside: “Who's driving this thing, Stevie Wonder?”
The first, while not from an action movie, is nonetheless from Eddie Murphy, and it
works because he's Eddie. The second works because John McClane is a regular dude, not a hetero Oscar Wilde with a badge, and he's gonna make a normal dumb guy joke.
Now, there are countless examples of stupid action movies using this joke out of sheer laziness, but rather than catalog them all, let's take an example from what may be the single stupidest action movie ever made:
Sly: “Who taught you to drive?”
Kurt Russell: “Steve Wonder!”
I speak, of course, and with proper reverence, of Tango & Cash. When we first saw this, in 1989, my mom said, as we walked out of the Duffield Theater, former jewel of downtown Brooklyn (closed after someone got shot there during a screening of New Jack City), with a huge smile on her face and a tinge of awe in her voice, “That might be the stupidest movie of the year.” I nodded and said yeah, a smile just as huge on my own face. And make no mistake, my mom and I saw some stupid fucking shit at that theater. We saw Firewalker there and multiple Jean-Claude Van Damme movies. In fact I think the only thing I saw there that wasn't stupid was when my dad and I saw Aliens. But Tango & Cash will always stand out among all those worthies.
Let us make a fine distinction here. “Stupid” and “Entertaining” are not mutually exclusive conditions, obviously. Tango & Cash offers the versatile cineaste heights of glee rarely—extremely rarely—approached in the history of movies. It stars Sly playing against type as a yuppie narcotics cop who spends the time when he's not out getting into car chases and shootouts talking about margin calls with his stockbroker, and Kurt Russell playing his arch-rival in the department, who gets into just as many car chases and shootouts, but clearly spends all the rest of his time at the hairdresser maintaining that glorious mullet. They have nothing in common except an ability to kick ass and blow stuff up. And by the end of the picture, they're the best of buddies. Awww.
We open with some loud, pounding music and Sly driving really fast in the desert. He's chasing two scumbags driving a tanker truck, but soon tires of this and drives way the hell ahead, in spite of being reminded that he's out of his jurisdiction via radio. Sly ignores this (being Sly) and parks in the middle of the road, right in front of the tanker truck. As the truck pulls within view, Sly puts a couple shots through the windshield. This spooks the scumbags, so much so that rather than just run Sly over (they are, after all, in a very large truck), they jam on the breaks and go flying through the windshield.
Sly (tossing them handcuffs): “You boys like jewelry?”
Big-jawed scumbag: “Fuck you.”
Sly: “I prefer blondes.”
Hurr hurr hurr, cuz he used to be married to Brigitte Nielsen! Because that's . . . funny . . . heh. Ahem. The baddies now under arrest, a bunch of redneck cops come up and yell at Sly for being out of his jurisdiction again, but Sly will hear none of it; he's been after these guys for months. (The question of how it took him months to catch two guys so retarded that they didn't just run him over and keep on truckin' is left unanswered). One of the rednecks says, “He thinks he's Rambo.” Sly turns on him, cool as can be, and says “Rambo . . . is a pussy.” BWAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!! Because, get it? SLY ALSO PLAYED RAMBO! (Actually, I shouldn't make fun, Sly's sense of humor about himself is one of this movie's saving graces.)
We then have a question of the contents of the truck. The rednecks are finding only gasoline. Sly, however, thinks otherwise, and fires a bullet into the side of the truck. Everybody's like fuck we're gonna die . . . but some white powder starts flowing out. Sly has a taste.
Sly: “Anybody wanna get high?”
Sly, I'm already high.
So, just so we're clear: firing your gun through someone's windshield and putting a round through the side of a tank that has gas in it, all good as long as you find some blow. We all good? Okay, let's continue.
We then meet Kurt Russell, scruffier and prole-ier. He ganks someone's copy of the LA Times, where he sees a story about Sly above the fold, and one about himself under the fold. Pleased with himself, he swaggers into his apartment, where a Vietnamese guy busts a couple shots at him. Kurt Russell takes them in his vest (movie vests are awesome; when you get shot you take a nap for anywhere from thirty seconds to five minutes and wake up all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed) and appears to be down for the count, until he suddenly shoots a gun out of his boot . . . wait . . . his boot is the gun. Hmm, okay. The Vietnamese guy runs for it, Kurt Russell pursues, they get in cars and end up in a parking garage where they destroy every car in the place, and some random Russian guy bellows in a Yakov Smirnoff accent about why the fuck Kurt Russell just destroyed his car, but Kurt Russell doesn't let this bother him as he busts the Vietnamese guy.
At the station, Kurt Russell brags on his exploits, and finds that someone fucked with his gun. (OR DID THEY? Could it not be the same gun? NO!) Sly is visited by his sister, a very young and decorative Teri Hatcher, who is reassuring him that her “dance tour” will not be non-stop debauchery. Both Sly and Kurt Russell are given a tip that some shit is going down . . . at the same address. Hmmm.
Meanwhile, Jack Palance explains to his two lackeys—who are thought to be the two biggest crimelords in LA—that he's setting Sly and Kurt Russell up. When asked by James Hong, in one of his more lucid and reasonable screen moments, Why don't you just kill them? Jack Palance has a delicious answer:
“Where would be the fun in that?”
Man, you gotta love villains who aren't just interested in being evil, but in being evil with style. One love, Jack Palance, one love, baby.
So our heroes walk right into a setup and get totally fuckin' railroaded by the system. The prosecution's entire case is basically handed to them by Jack Palance, through his right-hand man, a red-headed, pony-tailed, hilariously “English” accented Brion James. Sly and Kurt Russell bicker a bit, and get sent to prison together . . . only it's not the minimum security golf prison they were promised, it's a Movie Prison.
Movie Prison is an interesting construct, populated entirely with colorful eccentrics who spend their entire time bribing guards, having gladiator fights, and fucking new guys in the ass. Depending on the quality of the movie, these tendencies are either subdued, or over-the-top baroque. Tango & Cash is not a good movie. You know what that means. The inmates are throwing shit that's on fire. They're basically rioting in their cells. And the guards ain't doin' shit.
Sly gets put in a cell with Clint Howard. Kurt Russell gets to experience Negro Terror with his cellmate. Their first night, the whole fucking prison gets let out their cells by Brion James to take Sly and Kurt Russell down to the laundry room to be electrocuted, leading to two questions you probably shouldn't ask:
(1) Why don't they just kill Sly and Kurt Russell?
(2) Why doesn't everybody in the prison just escape, if Jack Palance has the power to just waltz in and do whatever the fuck he wants?
Again, don't ask shit like this in this kind of movie. An old buddy of Kurt Russell's who's the one hack at the prison Jack Palance hasn't bought, intervenes (why the inmates all just scatter instead of just killing him, especially since they do just a couple minutes later, another thing not to ask) and cooks up a scheme to bust Kurt Russell and Sly out. Sly's reluctant, and accepts his fate to eventually be tortured to death with an impressive serenity, but when Kurt Russell goes to escape by himself—and finds his hack buddy dead—Sly intervenes at just the right moment to save Kurt Russell's ass.
The prison escape is a pretty fuckin good example of action filmmaking. The camerawork's dark and sinister, the editing's tight, and if two motherfuckers know how to acquit themselves in an action sequence, it's John Rambo/Marion Cobretti and Snake Plissken/Jack Burton. They eventually electrocute the guy with the big jaw, slide down high tension lines, and get their asses out, but not before Sly, in response to Kurt Russell saying something sarcastic about “coffee and danish,” gets off the classic quip “I hate Danish.” BECAUSE OF BIRGITTE NIELSEN! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Sly tells Kurt Russell if he ever needs help, to go to Teri Hatcher's club and ask for her. In short order, Kurt Russell does need help, so he goes to Teri Hatcher's club and asks for her, and when introduced immediately falls head over heels (understandable, considering how hot she was back then and how nice a person she is in this), but the fuzz are closing in, which leads to one of the movie's dumbest (and, since the dumb in this movie exists symbiotically with the funny, most hilarious) moments—Kurt Russell sneaking out of the club in drag to the strains of “Harlem Nocturne” with Teri Hatcher posing as his lesbian biker girlfriend. The world's single stupidest cop takes one look at Kurt Russell and Teri Hatcher and says “Any chance of a threeway?” They fire their cigarettes at him in unison (throwing lit cigarettes at a cop is assaulting a police officer . . . wait, you don't give a shit either? Oh okay, moving on) and ride off into the night.
Sly comes by Teri Hatcher's house as she's giving Kurt Russell a backrub to fix the slight back injury he suffered bustin out of the hoosegow, and naturally thinks they're having sex (this is actually an intentionally funny scene). Sly, pissed though he is, is willing to suffer in silence until he sees someone outside the house, whereupon he grabs a wooden duck and springs into action, ending up totally scaring the shit out of his commanding officer, who's come by to warn Sly and Kurt Russell that they've got “48 hours” to clear their names (how the fuck he arrives at this figure when every cop in the universe except him is trying to arrest them anyway is as much a mystery as whatever happened to Walt), and so our heroes decide to get proactive.
They track down Michael Jeter, the sound geek who doctored the tape that basically single-handedly got them sent to the joint. Eventually, the road leads to Brion James, who our heroes manage to corner, and try the time-honored “hang the guy by his ankles off the top of a building” interrogation technique, but Brion James doesn't crack. Sly thinks of something, though, the slightly more radical “duct tape a grenade to the dude's face” interrogation technique, which causes Brion James to both piss his pants and inform our heroes of Jack Palance's existence and role in the larger affair. This is one of Sly and Kurt Russell's key bonding moments.
So some other dumb shit happens and Teri Hatcher gets kidnapped by the bad guys. Sly and Kurt Russell drop by Michael J. Pollard's to get some gadgets. This is one of my favorite dumb things in this movie—the LAPD has enough of a budget to afford to keep Q on staff? Awesome. The fact that it's Michael J. Pollard just makes it all the more awesome. Take a bow, sir.
And now, the final action sequence. Our heroes acquire a heavily armed SUV from Michael J. Pollard and storm Jack Palance's desert compound, guns blazing, explosions left and right, Kurt Russell's Stevie Wonder joke, etc etc. Fairly standard stuff, but well-staged. They kill everybody—Brion James with a grenade down the pants like before, but this one explodes—and finally corner Jack Palance, who's holding a gun to Teri Hatcher's head, in a room full of mirrors so you can't tell which one of him is real.
This climax, ironically, features one of the movie's only moments of intelligence: Sly and Kurt Russell separately figure out which Jack Palance is real, for two wholly different reasons, and shoot him, freeing Teri Hatcher. But there's still a bomb set to go off (ah, forget it, nothing else in this picture makes any fucking sense) and our heroes and the girl they both love have to flee the explosion with the requisite slow-motion face-first leap forward. Sly gives Kurt Russell and Teri Hatcher his blessing (grudgingly, but generously) and everyone lives happily ever after.
In the parlance of Tropic Thunder, the ultimate thing that saves Tango & Cash is that it never goes full retard. Ultimately, after extensive rewrites (done by Sly), a fired DP, a fired editor, a fired director, and a fired co-star (Kurt Russell was supposed to be played by Patrick Swayze . . . I love Swayze, but he ain't Kurt Russell) the picture comes out being exactly what it's supposed to be: loud, fast, and stupid. But as dumb as it is, there's an element of self-awareness about how stupid it is, and the credit for this has to go to Sly. Sly is a very smart guy who knows exactly what the fuck he's doing. He knew when he wrote Rocky to become a star, that if he wrote a simplistic screenplay that catered to a lot of the audience's worst and most sentimental impulses, and performed it like he meant it, that he'd be a big star. It also helped that a large part of him really did mean it. Every single other choice he made in the prime of his career, and even afterward (fuck it, I'm going to see his new picture that everybody's in) has been spot on, and the man is seriously, seriously rich.
And this brings us back to that Stevie Wonder joke. A throwaway line in the movie, to be sure, and it's kind of sad that Stevie is more known for the jokes than his tunes nowadays, but nobody held a gun to his head and forced him to write “I Just Called To Say I Love You.” Anyway. Instead of dwelling on the jokes and stuff, let's close with another great Stevie vid. Happy birthday, sir.
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