Clubbin'

As it's New Year's Eve tonight, I thought a more in depth discussion of the club in "Tango & Cash" where Kiki dances would be warranted. I touched on it earlier, but it really is crying out for more thorough coverage. Ray Tango tells Gabe Cash to reach him through Kiki by going to the club, and what Cash finds upon arrival is remarkable. First of all, it's an enormous club. I'm not a dedicated clubber, but from my limited experience, I never have seen the like.

The place is really hopping, which I have see. Cash manages to wade through the crowd rapidly, failing to find anyone who knows Kiki. She enters the main room on her motorcycle, riding it up a ramp that leads past the main stage to the dressing rooms (!). Cash only finds out it's her afterwards, when he easily makes his way into said dressing room filled with topless women. They eye him, seemingly eager to jump his bones rather than to report him to the many police who are evidently aware that the sister of a wanted fugitive is at the club and might be contacted.

A critical part of Kiki's dance is that she apparently plays drums. If you want to know how that is, I can't explain it no matter how many times I watch the movie. What I do know is that the lone bartender at an extremely busy club is somehow the one charged with holding her drumsticks until she needs them. Making matters worse, he is further distracted from that responsibility by Cash looking for Kiki, and by a patron who has been waiting a long time for his drink. The flustered bartender gives the man the drink for free, which is possibly the least plausible event in the entire movie.

Cash and Kiki escape the bar in an awfully unlikely fashion, with her posing as a brusque biker babe and he as her subservient lesbian girlfriend "Lynn". The cartoonishly misognist cops watching for Cash out back do not question the appearance of this very formidably built woman who rather notably wears a scarf around her neck. So ends the club sequence, which would be the main highlight of many movies, but which is merely one of many in Tango & Cash.