Robert Duvall directed this film, which seems first of all made in order to allow Robert Duvall the actor to play a pretended complex character of a paid killer with a soul. From this point of view the film is a failure. The character does not succeed to gain the sympathy of the viewer, and the complexity of the character is faked. Too much is badly written or un-explained in this movie. Even if action is not supposed to be in the focus, the reasons and details of the murder conspiracy and the events around are left too much in the fuzzy zone.

What remains is the well described atmosphere of Argentina, and the love of the character with tango dancing, and the beautiful Argentinian who introduces him to the secrets of tango. These are indeed the best moments of the film, but it is still to little to sustain the film, and left me with the feeling that they are strangely disconnected from the rest.

An un-satisfactory film experience. 6/10 on my personal scale.

When I first saw Robert Duvall's earlier "The Apostle" (1997),I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt being that it was his first effort as both lead actor and director. Mistakes were made and I thought he would learn from them. Boy, was I wrong. In "Assassination Tango" he not only repeats all his earlier mistakes, but adds to and compounds them in the process. There are four main credits in a film (writer, producer, director, and lead actor) and a useful rule of thumb is that if any one individual has at least three of those, the film is almost guaranteed to be bad. With all four credits to his name, Duvall's effort shows just how true this can be.

The pacing is terrible; scenes go on for much too long. Notably, these scenes all involve Duvall's character, an aging hit man who may be ready to finally retire from the business. Duvall proves again, as he did in "The Apostle", that he is an actor in desperate need of direction. When he directs himself; i.e., when he's receiving no direction at all, he is just awful. In Duvall's portrayal, the character John J. is simply unbelievable.

He is supposed to be an experienced assassin who worked 10 years in Guatemala (from which I infer as a U.S. government black ops agent) and you would think such an individual would know how not to attract attention to himself. But not the way Duvall plays him. He flies off the handle at the least provocation: a colleague tells him he's looking tired and Duvall gets all up in his face over it; he's told that consideration was given to sending someone else on his latest assignment and he goes ballistic, spouting enough information about his past to get himself convicted in any courtroom; he learns he can't return home from his assignment in Argentina for another two weeks and he repeatedly stomps a pay phone in a public street. As played by Duvall, John J. is constantly running off at the mouth; he can't shut up for five minutes even when he's alone. This is a top of the line killer who knows how to stay under the radar? The female lead is played by newcomer Luciana Pedraza who, while certainly accomplished as a dancer (assuming she did her own dance numbers),is entirely lacking in screen charisma. A flatter, more two-dimensional portrayal would be hard to imagine. Overall, the acting in this film can best be summed up by noting that Ruben Blades gives the best performance of the cast. When was the last time that was ever said about him? The film's one redeeming grace are the artful dance sequences, but then you can just watch a song & dance film if that's what you're after. Rating: 4/10.

I love this film so much I bought it in DVD, and in the last three years have shown it to 1) my Argentine wife; 2) her adult children and their friends; 3)several of my Argentine friends, and 4) the cats (who have to watch it while I'm watching it). All except the last have -- to a person -- found it both completely believable and unremarkable in the sense of "yeah, so what's new?" in its verisimilitude. The film is just about as crazy as real life is in Argentina, and the police-overruling-police scene is just one example. The conversations in the tango joint about the tango and people and Argentina and life are all about as real as I've witnessed here myself.

The longer I'm here the more I realize how difficult it is to portray what Argentina is "really like," mainly because it isn't any one thing but a whole mishmash of cultural, historical, economic, and political things that career around in people's lives and their minds and their emotions continuously.

The only thing I can say for sure is that if you meet anyone -- even an Argentine -- who tells you Argentina and its life and culture are easy to explain, don't believe it.

Someone said living here is like living a Kafka novel, and sometimes it certainly can feel that way. Conspiracy theory as a way of life has been endemic here, as far as I can tell, since the country first got going. The rural-urban split is real -- the whole City of Buenos Aires votes completely differently from the rest of the country and it doesn't mean a whit of difference except that the federal government becomes even more reluctant to help the capital because its politics are so frequently played out on another planet. And I'm not sure I agree with other comments that Argentines have a big inferiority complex; I think it's more like a "confusion" complex, i.e., "Why don't these other people understand life the way I do?"

The film also reminds me a bit of Apochalypse Now in that you just sort of have to watch it -- many times, perhaps -- and realize at the end you're just about as confused as you were when you first saw it, so if you're like me, you accept that, live with it, and are happy to hear any new interpretations that might come along.

Finally, I believe that Argentina is not a comfortable place to live if you're not extremely familiarity with and experienced in living in paradox, confusion, and Isaiah Berlin's theory of "negative freedoms." Thank God, I love it. But I know many don't!