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Long before DOOM changed the videogaming world by providing us with the image of a crazed soldier mowing down legions of hell-sent demon spawns with a chaingun, Arnold Schwarzenegger did just that in COMMANDO, arguably the greatest of all the "one man army" movies of the 1980s. How did this bloody gem come into being? Well, to this day I can almost imagine some demented screenwriter hacking away at a typewriter in a smoke-filled room, muttering: "I've slashed the plot...thrown out all sense of realism...reduced the dialogue to a series of one-liners...WHAT MORE CAN I DO?"
What more, indeed?
COMMANDO is the story of John Matrix (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a retired special ops guy who evidently spends 23 hours a day in a weight room when he's not playing single daddy to his daughter, played by a pre-tween Alyssa Milano. Everything's hunky-dory in Matrix's remote cabin until a platoon of bad guys shows up, kidnaps his daughter, and try to blackmail Matrix into one last job -- the assassination of some banana republic el presidente. Unfortunately for the bad guys -- played with tremendous relish by such staples of 80s films as Dan Hedaya, Vernon Wells, David Patrick Kelly and Bill Duke -- Matrix has no intention of killing el presidente. Instead, he wants to kill all of them, and for the next 90 odd minutes that's precisely what he does, in between forcing the ubiquitous Rae Dawn Chong to serve as his unwilling assistant, throwing out barbaric one-liners over the smoking corpses of his victims, and pausing momentarily to check his watch. Notice I didn't say "pause to reload" because, damn it, not only does Matrix "eat Green Berets for breakfast," he's also pretty much immune to mortal conundrums which would present us with difficulty -- you know, things like bullets and gravity and stuff. Watching this movie gives one the strange masculine sense of satisfaction which occurs when you explode a frog with a firecracker or feed a two-by-four into a circular saw. It's simply the pleasure of mindless destruction, set to a cheesily wonderful 80s soundtrack.
The moral lessons of COMMANDO are those of the decade that spawned it, to wit: might makes right, bullets only hit bad guys, and there is no problem with a machine gun, high explosives and a HUGE killing knife cannot solve. As for the violence, it's a character in itself and makes up for the paper-thin plot and utter lack of any kind of believeability. It took Jason Voorhees ten or twelve hockey-mask wearing sequels to do what Ah-nold does here in under two hours. From the smug blackmailer who gets a bullet between the eyes for daring to say to Matrix, "So you have to do what we want, right?" (answer: "Wrong.") to the pint-sized kidnapper who gets hurled off a cliff after being humiliated via the classic line, "Remember when I told you I was going to kill you last? I LIED!", to the unfortunate mercenary who gets his scalp sawed off with a gardening tool, this movie is a fellowship of death, right up until the moment he impales the Gay Pirate on a steam boiler (after electrocuting him) and barks, "Let off some steam, Bennett!"
Army? We don't need no stinking Army. We've got JOHN MATRIX.
It must be said that everything about this movie is awseomely bad, and the worse the movie gets, the awesome-er it becomes. Arnold, fresh of triumphs in CONAN and TERMINATOR, is near his cigar-chewing, throat-slitting, single-entendre-spewing best here. So is Vernon Wells, the baddie from THE ROAD WARRIOR who has the misfortune to have to fight a bare-chested Arnold while wearing a tight chain mail shirt that serves mainly to remind the audience that his workout routine probably included lifting plates of donuts off the craft services table in between slugs of Foster's. (What was Dan Hedaya thinking, taking on mercenaries like Wells and Duke, so clearly in need of a Stairmaster? And while we're at it, how did hiring the 5'4" of fury that is David Patrick Kelly seem like a good idea?) Hell, even Bill Paxton gets in on the fun, though it must be said (ahem) that he doesn't actually get to kill anybody.
The 80s are an easy decade to mock The fashions were bad, the hairstyles appalling, and a lot of the pop music made you want to slam an ice-pick through your eardrums. On the other hand, and possibly because of this, such a slew of amazingly good, totally irresponsible and uber-violent films has seldom been unleashed by Hollywood like so many slavering hell-hounds. Among the best of these? COMMANDO, a movie that scientifically proves that good will not only triumph over evil, it will pop a 5.56 mm slug through its forehead and then make fun of it as it twitches.
| Additional Blu-ray options | Edition | Discs | Price | New from | Used from |
|
Blu-ray
May 11, 2015 "Please retry" | Director's Cut | 1 | $11.80 | $11.80 |
|
Blu-ray
April 15, 2008 "Please retry" | No enhanced packaging | 1 |
—
| $14.00 | $24.99 |
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Reviews with images
Commando
Es una de mis películas de acción favorita y su actor principal es uno de mis actores favoritos, continuo viendo la película desde que tenía 13 años!
Top reviews from other countries
Tutto ok perfetto ottimo.. affidabile
Ottimo
Reviewed in Italy on February 17, 2024