Assassination Tango (2003)

I love this movie so much

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

It's a great title, conjuring up the idea of an assassin and his target in an intricate dance of death with each trying to outwit the other. Not so oddly, none of this occurs in the movie, and the intended assassination has nothing at all to do with the tango. It could be that as a writer and director, Robert Duvall is a much better actor. In fact, I consider him my favorite modern day actor on the strength of such films as "Open Range" and "The Judge", not to mention the 'Godfather' films he appeared in. But here he just seems out of his league in a picture that meanders around in search of a compelling story line. In particular, the circumstances surrounding the Argentinian collaborators, Orlando (Julio Mechoso) and Miguel (Ruben Blades) was handled very weakly. Their apprehension by authorities was explained after the fact by a bug in John J's (Duvall) room, but it just seemed a very lazy rationale with a noticeable lack of intrigue. Regarding the 'tango' part of the story, I thought the dancers, Luciana Pedraza as Manuela, and Geraldine Rojas as Pirucha, were exceptional in their roles, but would have better served the story if their characters weren't so passive. Maybe this could all be fixed with a re-write in which Robert Duvall plays the part of The Tango Assassin.

Duvall owns this film, starring, writing, and directing... but he does not seem to know if he wants to make a movie about the beauty of tango or the banality of organized murder. At once it seems like he is trying to draw a parallel between the passion of dance and the intricacies of crime, but he allows scenes to drag on too long without significant action or dialogue.I get the feeling that Duvall wanted to celebrate the tango in its natural habitat without indulging in the erotic aspects of the dance, just as he wanted to portray a crotchety assassin in a foreign land without speaking of the relevant political context. He wants to keep it all simple: great dancing and a little bit of murder. And that is all we get.For a movie about such potent subjects as sex and death, dance and crime, loyalty and treachery, Duvall's storytelling here is just lukewarm. The fact that his protagonist meets such a captivating girl and does not consummate the relationship is indicative of the film's own lack of fulfillment. The painfully weak ending further betrays the energy of the dance the film purports to enjoy.

Hey, I like Robert Duvall, and have been a face of his since the mid 1960s. However, this film is nothing more then Duvall's tribute to his Argentine wife, who he met and later married. He is so in love with a woman 41 years younger than himself and her Tango dancing skills, that he spends countless time showing people dancing Tango. He should of made a 30 minute video on Tango, instead of surrounding a nothing story around the dance. A hit man in Argentina falls in love with the Tango. Tango is presented as "Life". Nothing is more important than dancing Tango, drinking whiskey and smoking. And Mr. Duvall as the leading man in an action film just doesn't go over. He's a senior citizen with a pony tail and a wife young enough to be his grand-daughter. Hey! more power to him! Let him use this excuse for a artistic film as a home movie.

Robert Duvall's greatness lies in part, on his ability to become the character he's portraying, his identity subsumed in the film. In this movie, unfortunately, he emerges not as a hit man, but as an odd permutation of Harvey Keitel. I found myself wondering exactly "who" I was watching. Discovering after the fact that Duvall wrote the screenplay, all became clear. Actors tend to be empty vessels, filled by a writer's creation...Duvall mistook his acting gifts for writing talent, and produced an interesting glimpse of Buenos Aires' tango world, populated with the road show cast of "Reservoir Dogs". A few viewings of "The Official Story" might have provided better source material for Duvall, although the dialog consistently fails to ring true.