A Commando ReWatch

• Directed by Mark L. Lester
• October 4, 1985

A retired United States Army Special Forces colonel is now living peacefully with his daughter but enemies from his past try to force him to assassinate a Latin American president. Now he must escape their clutches and rescue his daughter before they find out he has not carried out the plot.

Commando is by far not only one of Schwarzenegger’s best films but one of the best action films of the 80s. It is just adrenaline fun and filled with testosterone driven action that you just don’t see you today. It has numerous special effects and action pieces that you just don’t get in modern films. One of the reasons this is so good is because it lacks CGI. There is just something superior about an action movie that you know the explosions and all the stunts are done in the real world and not on a computer.

Schwarzenegger’s character of John Matrix goes muscling through and shooting everything up in order to save if his daughter Jenny (Alyssa Milano) who has been kidnapped in an effort to force him to kill some Latin American democratically elected president that Matrix helped put in office. Do not think about that apparent contradiction. His ability to take on all comers borders on superhuman. Then again at the time action heroes tended to be larger than life and ridiculously powered if you will. Nobody is as good of a fighter as they put into half the action movies of the time. Which brings me back to why this is one of the best. It’s escapist fun. It is wish fulfillment.

We have Matrix dealing with a small army singlehandedly. Mostly anyway. Loud guns and louder explosions. Circular saw blades used as throwing stars. All in protection of a little girl and American ideals abroad. That connects to something in our psyche then and now.

Rather than go after the girlfriend or the wife or the generical love interest in this movie Schwarzenegger has to go after his daughter. A bit of a switch for the genre. What happened to mother? Who cares? Jenny is a smarty-pants kid but one that threw a few scenes establishes being much like her father which helps a little bit. I’m not a big fan of cute kids in any movie. Never been. You don’t need to cute a movie up. Alyssa Milano as Jenny is all stereotypical teen spunk of the era with a mouth on her in addition to capabilities proportionally equivalent to her superhuman dad.

Dan Hedaya is a one of the great character actors. He is a genuinely talented individual. He played the scummy ex-husband on Cheers. He played a comedic take on Richard Nixon. He was in the Sylvester Stallone action film Daylight. There was a point in film history when he was just everywhere, and he never sucked. To say I get excited when I see that he’s in a movie or TV show might be a bit of an over statement, but it does mean that there will be at least one good performance in what I am watching.

Here he is Arius who is the slimy deposed dictator of the vaguely located Latin American country of this movie. The place is a poverty-stricken shithole, but John Matrix and his unit freed it from the dictator. Arius has an island lair with highly disposable soldiers to be killed in the explosion addled ending. Based on the number of corpses Matrix created you really need to ask why Arius needed Matrix for this assassination. Why not just go with his own forces? The interesting part is Schwarzenegger clearly has the ability to kill everyone in his path as does his team apparently yet this murderous dictator not only survived but was allowed to flee and somehow found himself on American soil just off the coast of California. You would think given what we see in the movie Arius would be dead.

You come to these movies for the action and not for the intelligent plot. Seriously. Somehow I don’t believe that a random dude regardless of how significant he was to someone’s rise to power could simply show up at an inauguration or event of any type and get waived in to a point he was close enough to kill.

It was years before I knew that Bennett (Vernon Wells) was played by the same guy from Mad Max 2. You can hear it in the voice but in the physical portrayal you cannot. He was also in a third movie that I enjoyed that I earlier discussed called Circuitry Man as well as its sequel. Again, I did not know that it was all the same guy for the longest time. He really transformed himself between each role. He gave each one something very different to the point you couldn’t easily link each as being done by the same actor. That is real talent there.

Bennett is all hammy villain here. His character really believes Matrix is essentially Superman. Wells chews up every scene he is in with ridiculously menacing dialogue either about the situation or about what John Matrix will do and he does this ridiculous crazy eye thing. Vernon Wells was amazing here. Nobody could do crazy in the 80s like Wells. And it’s still hard to believe he was in those films I mentioned. His build up of the crazy monster Bennett makes the final fight epic.

And what’s an 80s action movie without a girlfriend? Rae Dawn Chong as flight attendant and conveniently pilot-in-training Cindy has a career highlight here. She’s the comic relief to Schwarzenegger’s serious testosterone driven character. Her conveniently being a pilot is just one of those things you must accept in an action film from then. She has just as many quips as Matrix does and is more than just an attractive female presence. She has some skills that Matrix doesn’t and even helps him escape.

Speaking of that escape everything else that Matrix does that occurs in this movie gets mentioned by Gen. Kirby (James Olson) as he follows behind yet nobody brings up that police van or the two drivers who may have been seriously injured by the explosion from the rocket at all. If you take a moment out to think you would realize just how bad of an idea that is but in a movie with A-Team level logic it works.

James Horner was probably one of my favorite movie composers. Top 5 of all time easily. You have James Horner, John Williams, Basil Poledouris, Ennio Morricone, and I am having trouble with a fifth, but you get the point.

Horner knew what he was doing. He could tell a story with his music. He could heighten the intended emotion of a scene or just whatever. He was one of the greats. I’m not sure what he was thinking here with the music for Commando, but it is perfect. The music sounds like it would be more at home in a forgettable 80s romantic comedy and not in a movie about a one-man army trying to save his daughter. It’s steel drums and very tropical for some reason but it somehow works. It’s just perfect for this movie and I don’t know how he came to that decision. 

Commando is an action classic and one of Schwarzenegger’s best films. It has everything you could possibly want in an action movie. If you have a choice between this movie or something else, choose this movie because you won’t be disappointed!