By Geno McGahee
They don’t make action movies like they used to. It’s fair to say that they could not recreate a force like Arnold Schwarzenegger and in 1985, Arnie was just finding his footing. Scoring with TERMINATOR and the CONAN films, Arnie was getting traction as a player in film, leading to a shift to an incredible action film by the name of COMMANDO.
John Matrix (Schwarzenegger) is a former military asset with incredible skills that has given it all up to live in the middle of nowhere with his daughter, Jenny (Alyssa Milano). After feeding deer, chopping wood and having ice cream rubbed in his face, Matrix is informed by his military friends that there are some bad guys coming for him.
In the meantime, Cooke (Bill Duke) is doing some very bad things. First, he somehow gets his hands on a garbage truck and kills a guy taking out his trash. He then goes to look at cars and runs over the salesman. After that, he blows up a boat. This guy Cooke enjoys violence and I realized that he was also in PREDATOR with Arnie. This film also has Bill Paxton in a small role and he was in TERMINATOR and TRUE LIES with Arnie. He was also in TITANIC, but Arnie wasn’t in that. So disregard.
Matrix’s house is attacked by a bunch of goons and they kidnap his daughter. At one point, we get one of the best scenes of the film. Maxtrix walks into his daughter’s room and finds some dude sitting there and demands that he does what he says. “You’re going to do what we say, right?” “Wrong,” and Arnie shoots him in the head. Fucking righteous. Actually, it’s beyond fucking righteous.
As Matrix tries to get his daughter back, he is attacked by a bunch of bad guys, taking them all down, one by one, until he runs into an old friend that he was told died. Bennett (Vernon Wells), wearing chainmail and leather pants and sporting a 70’s porn mustache, he lets his old war buddy know that he’s now on the take and has some very special plans for him. On this team of bad guys, we also have Sully, played by David Patrick Kelly, and you can’t go wrong with him. He was great in DREAMSCAPE. He’s just as good here.
Arius (Dan Hedaya) has a big plan to use Matrix to take out some world leader of some sort or his daughter dies! He is to get on a plane and fly to the country and kill the leader, but he has other plans. He takes out the escort on the plane and notes to the flight attendant to not bother him, saying that “he’s dead tired.” Fuck, this is a wonderful movie.
As Matrix tries to put together the pieces of the puzzle and find his daughter, he meets Cindy (Rae Dawn Chong), a flight attendant that Sully was sexually harassing. Sully had a great approach to meeting women. Come on strong and when they turn you down, call them a “fucking whore.”
Matrix and Cindy catch up with Sully and a get some information, but not before we see a great fight scene at the mall with Matrix and a shit ton of security guards. I could not stop laughing when I saw Arnie down on the ground and with 10 or so security guards on top of him, only to have him launch up and watch them all fly off. It was so unrealistically awesome.
As Matrix continues his path, he catches up with that evil prick, Cooke, in a hotel room. As they fight, they crash through a wall and stumble upon another hotel room where they are recoding a porno. COMMANDO has it all. This was such a nice touch. The nasty ways of Cooke comes to an end and now there’s only two men left, Bennett and Arius, for Matrix to take out. Well, there’s about 500 soldiers that work for Arius, but they never had a chance.
Matrix gets to the island where they are keeping his daughter and the absurdity hits an all-time high. SO MANY goons die in this scene and never land a shot as Matrix shoots them one by one and sometimes they come at him by the dozen. No worries, he takes them all out. This is so fucking hilarious to watch.
All of the explosions, dead bodies and gunfire, lead to the epic battle between Bennett and Matrix and if you think that Bennett is going to win, you don’t know much about Arnold Schwarzenegger 80’s action films.
COMMANDO is awesome. It is an action film that focuses on action. Who cares about anything else? This film may be called empty by some, but it’s the most full empty film I’ve ever seen. I highly recommend it and am still laughing at the absurd greatness of what I just witnessed.
