Tough Guys (1986)

Please click the links to read my reviews of two other pairings of Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster: Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and Seven Days in May. 

Synopsis: Silver screen legends Douglas and Lancaster re-team one last time to sleepwalk their way through a highly-contrived, poorly written and largely forgettable caper comedy. 

Blurb From the VHS Jacket: “Screen giants Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas star in this upbeat, action-packed comedy adventure.” 

What Did I Learn?: 1) The Gold Coast Flyer weighs 70 tons. 2) Surrender’s for wimps! 3) You can’t go throwing yogurt into everyone’s faces when you lose your cool.

You Might Like This Movie If: You've always wanted to see Janet Jackson's strangest music video. 

Really?: 1) Holy shit, there’s something wrong when you have Burt Lancaster cracking one-liners and you have DANA CARVEY playing a thankless straight-man role. 2) So, wait - Archie and Harry - two elderly ex-cons -  foil a bank robbery on their first day out of prison, and it doesn’t make the evening news? 3) Maybe I missed something, but why are Archie and Harry on parole, exactly? They were sentenced to thirty years in the slammer (which seems like an awfully long sentence, considering they didn’t hurt anyone), and they served their time. 4) How do Archie and Harry keep encountering so many gratuitously nasty people? 5) I’m curious: is money an issue for Archie and Harry? Is the state paying for Harry’s retirement home room? How can Archie afford to buy an Uzi or that loud club suit when he keeps getting fired from crappy minimum wage jobs? 6) Wow… Archie and Harry are released from prison exactly one week before the Gold Coast Flyer makes its final run, and they’re fortunate enough to catch that bit of news in time. 7) Obviously, it’s ridiculous to see a couple of unarmed senior citizens beat up and terrify a bunch of street punks, but let’s ask a couple of deeper questions about that scene… have multi-ethnic street gangs ever really existed outside of Hollywood productions? And does anyone seriously think that an LA street gang would be armed with switchblades, circa 1986? 

Rating: I hadn’t watched Tough Guys since the early 1990s, and I somehow remembered it being a lot funnier. While it’s nice that Douglas and Lancaster made one final movie together, it’s a shame they chose this turkey. Tough Guys suffers from a number of problems (see: “Synopsis” and “Really?”); the biggest in my mind being that Archie and Harry apparently possess balls of steel. These gents carry themselves with so much confidence that the audience knows they’re never really in any danger, so there’s no emotional payoff when they finally succeed. 6/10 stars. 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092105/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0