COMMANDO - The Terminator's Greatest Hits!

Ah, the eighties - long has it been my contention that this decade was the golden age of action movies. Aliens, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Conan, Rambo, Delta Force, Total Recall, Escape from New York, Big Trouble in Little China - they just don&#146t make Big Dumb and Loud Movies like these any more.

One of Ah-nold's lesser flicks. While it only made 30 million - which is no slouch, it was no Predator (60 million) or Terminator (78 million and change) , and quietly slipped to Ah-nold's B-list of movies. Good, but not quite the powerhouse that we've come to expect from the Big Lug at this stage of the game.

We open with a peaceful, tranquil mountain home, where John Matrix (Here, Ah-nold obeys the 80's Action Hero Naming Convention that dictates that the star's last name must be a verb or a Noun. See Cobra, Megaforce and Invasion U.S.A. for further examples of Prime Directive #1) lives with his 13-ish year old daughter in peace. Being an Ah-nold action flick, this will inevitably last about as long as the opening credits.

And yes it does - as soon as the Old Army Buddy comes to warn Matrix that some old enemies are on the warpath, does said old enemies descend upon the mountain vista house and snatch his daughter. Mayhem ensues as Matrix pushes his disabled 4-by-4 over a cliff and gives chase. He would have caught the braggarts too, if it not been for Prime Directive #2: any vehicles involved in a wreck will roll and instantly explode into a ball of flame.

Getting the drop on Matrix, they tell him the bad news: assassinate the president of Unspecifiedistan so that one of his generals (The mastermind behind the kidnapping) can swoop in and seize power for himself, or his little girl will suffer the consiquences. Matrix responds by killing his handler while boarding the jet plane to Unspecifiedistan, working his way into the cargo hold, climbing out onto the landing gear and freakin' jumping from the plane into a swamp! Not only is it a badass sequence, they actually get Ah-nold hanging off a prop landing strut moving along at a full head of speed. It's badassed AND it's exciting!

Anyway, Matrix follows Sully, the goon who saw him off on the plane, to the Galleria Mall (fer sure!) where he gets kidnap victim/sidekick Cindy (played by Rae Dawn Chong, daughter of the famous stoner Tommy Chong) to lure him over in a trap. Things go all wrong, of course and suddenly Ah-nold has to brawl the entire mall's rent-a-cop force, rip an entire phone booth out of the wall and swing from a banner hanging from the ceiling to the elevator and the escaping Sully, all amid a hail of gunfire (only in Hollywood would rent-a-cops carry huge hand cannons like that - and open fire in a crowd!).

One vigorous car chase later ("I let him go") and Matrix gets involved in another brawl in a sleazy motel room with another Goon, throwing each other through walls, glass tables, doors (where we get our third 80's Action Movie Prime Directive: Give 'em a glimpse of some great big knockers once in a while!) before Ah-nold impales him on a BIG FREAKING TABLE LEG! This is also where I realized that Ah-nold was going back to the Terminator well again. So far we've had "I'll be back" and "Fuck you, Asshole", and in a few moments we'll get Bill Paxton in a really short scene - it's like it's stealing all his really good bits for Commando. Still, he rammed a table leg through a guys chest, so who am I to argue?

And so Ah-nold proceeds to slaughter and butcher and destroy his way up the chain of command, complete with rocket launcher, heavily guarded prison transport, bulldozer and the most powerful claymore mines ever known to man before getting in The Final Showdown knife fight with the guy from his old squad that sold him out to the El Presidente wannabe. One witty Ah-nold catchphrase latter (Prime Directive 4: Dispatch the bad guy with a quip) and Matrix gets to ride off into - quite literarily - the sunset with his daughter and offspring of a famous stoner.

As you can tell, the script isn't exactly Oscar winning material here. In fact, if you apply any logic to the film whatsoever, the whole damn thing falls apart faster than Ah-nold's shell casings hitting the ground - but then find me an Ah-nold movie that the above DOESN'T apply. So yeah, the conventions of the genre demand that you check your brain at the door (and keep your claim ticket. Getting it back without one is a pain).

That said, this thing is a non-stop action fest. From the opening credits to the final fade out, this thing is constant mayhem. A constant parade of explosions, car chases, gun fights, fist fights, witty one-liners and superficial knife slashes that only rip the shirt and draw a insignificant amount of blood are all on display here. In fact the action is so over the top that we're bordering on being a live action cartoon.

Honestly to give this flick any degree of analysis is an exercise in futility. It's an eighties larger than life Schwarzenegger flick with a reliance big explosions rather than acting to carry the story.

Actually in many ways Commando (and it's eighties kin) is a superior movie than what we get now. There's a lack of computer generated nonsense - every explosion, every squib, every car wreck, every bullet hit was a practical special effect with real life stuntmen in peril. The camera work was straightforward, none of this "Lets shake the camera around violently so the viewer has a sense of chaos and we can cover the fact that our leads don't know how to fight" crap that Hollywood seems to have embraced over the last ten years or so. As I watch more and more eighties action flicks, I'm convinced that the action movie is a vanishing art in film, where muscle-bound men such as Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Segal and Norris could kill a 1,200 men with a single clip of ammunition and we'd be okay with this. Very refreshing!

BREASTS ON DISPLAY: 2
EXPLOSIONS: 104
ROUNDS FIRED: 7,801
PUNCHES THROWN: 257
HANDRAIL DEATHS: 5
CAR CHASES: 2
FRUIT CARTS DESTROYED: 0
NINJA? No
F BOMBS DROPPED: 6
BEST LINE: "Remember Sully, when I promised to kill you last? I lied."

THE DVD -
Commando gets a first rate treatment, and the video looks downright fantastic. There's a few moments where the ancient film stock shows it's age (mostly in the night scenes), but the disc looks great otherwise. Overall, a quality transfer. The soundtrack is nice and loud and aggressive as you would expect, with a nice 5.1 surround mix.

THE EXTRAS -
Feature one is the inclusion of both a directors cut and the original theatrical release - although the additions to the new cut are negligible. There are like three really short scenes that don't add much - there's a bit more gore flowing in the tool shed scene towards the end, but that's about it of note.

We get a commentary from director Mark Lester who carries the commentary himself (resulting in some dead air), but does a pretty good job filling us in on the behind the scenes details of the shoot. There's a short fifteen minute documentary with some of the crew - Rae Dawn Chong, Vernon Wells, and the screenwriters come back for brand new interviews. And then we get a shorter, in-depth discussion about the one-liners of Commando (or which, I must admit, there are plenty and they are strong). There's a couple of really short deleted scenes that are basically alternate one-liners for Bennett&#146s demise. Finally we get a really extensive photo gallery.

Damnit all - no trailer! The original DVD release had the trailer included, but not the directors cut. That&#146s a damn shame, and a pox on you 20th Century Fox, for dropping it!

THE BOTTOM LINE -
Why Commando is one of Ah-nolds B-list films is confusing. The acting is just as good as anything else we get from the Governator in this time, the plot doesn't make any more sense than anything else we got in the eighties and it delivers at the action at a breakneck pace (pun intended). Why this failed to light the screen on fire while Predator went on to fame and fortune is beyond me.