Assassination Tango
It's impressive when something like
Assassination Tango gets made - when an actor comes up with a part or subject that interests him, and manages to get a movie made just so that he can play that part. Heck, Salma Hayek rode that to an [undeserved] Oscar nomination for
Frida, and Robert Duvall (the writer/director/producer/star of
Assassination Tango) has done it well twice before, in
The Apostle and
A Shot At Glory.
Sadly,
Assassination Tango isn't as good as any of those movies. It has good pieces, and an authentic feel to it, but while Duvall has created himself a character in John J. Anderson, full of potentially-interesting contradictions that he inhabits quite well, Duvall-the-actor is let down by Duvall-the-writer, who doesn't give the cast anything interesting to do. He's also somewhat greedy about it - Anderson has all sorts of quirks, but the rest of the characters are pretty thin cardboard.
It also doesn't help that while Duvall's previous vanity roles were somewhat unique, John is a movie staple, the contract killer who seems pleasant enough when he's not actively murdering people. Sure, the idea that he's aging and perhaps starting to get a little fuzzy in the head is something of a new angle. And there's perhaps a good movie to be made of how he's not nearly as interested in his girlfriend as in her daughter. But those are side issues, never fully explored.
The movie's reason for being seems to be the tango. I gather Duvall has a long-standing interest in the dance, and it's easy to understand why - it's passionate but poker-faced, and the partners have to be in complete synchronicity to avoid getting in each other's way while occupying the same space. A late sequence of dancers telling tango stories is intriguing, with the feel of gaining secret knowledge usually found in documentaries.
But that's only half the movie, and a half that the age-70+ Duvall isn't really physically up to. The other half, about him being contracted to kill an Argentine war criminal, wanders by on auto-pilot, with half of the story seemingly taking place off-screen. And this is just not very interesting; it's stuff we've seen before, not presented in a terribly interesting way.
There's nuggets of good stuff in here, but the overall presentation, I think, is lacking.
½