COMMANDO, along with the RAMBO trilogy, is one of the greatest movies of all-time. It's often invoked by nostalgic moviegoers as an argument for the right of watching any Michael Bay or Michael-Bay inspired garbage. "I just miss old, mindless action movie like COMMANDO," is the line you will hear over and over again. Problem is, I love COMMANDO and it's painful to me to see it qualified as a garbage, throwaway movie. It's clearly not since it transcended time and still occupies as of today a proud place in most young men's DVD collection. Viewing it after many years, including four years of active fiction writing, was somewhat of an eye-opening, myth busting experience for me. See, COMMANDO is highly unrealistic, morally dubious and it sure shit doesn't give a fuck. But it's not a mindless movie. In fact, it's a lot more clever and deliberate than what people give it credit for.
Part of what makes COMMANDO so great is it's absolute refusal to play by the rules of narrative conventions. John Matrix (Arnie) is a retired special ops hot shot and his daughter Jenny (Alyssa Freakin' Milano) gets kidnapped by Arius, the jilted dictator of small, fictional republic of Val Verde (Dan Hedaya). He needs to overthrow the government he helped put in place of Arius if he wants to see Jenny alive again. Should Matrix play along with the crazed despot for the sake of his daughter? No. John Matrix doesn't give a fuck about Val Verde. He shoots the messenger in the face, manages to jump from the plane he was put on by Arius and embarks on a vengeance mission he needs to wrap up in eleven hours, the time by which the flight will land in Val Verde. That's right, COMMANDO has a story that screenwriters and director Mark. L. Lester willingly tiptoed around because it got in the way of the movie's first goal: have Arnie kill as many motherfuckers as possible, in the most gleeful and original ways.
If you decide to give COMMANDO another viewing, keep your eyes opened for the character of Cindy (Rae Dawn Chong). She is the hard evidence of COMMANDO's defiance of narrative conventions. She has no business in this movie, she's a girl-next-door with no actual connection to what's going on and yet, Arnie is dragging her around like a ball-and-chain for the entire movie. Why? Because she keeps asking questions and throwing quips about why the fuck doesn't anything happen like in a normal movie. She is COMMANDO's self-awareness. Remember when Matrix throws his beautiful one-liner about eating green berets for breakfast? Not everybody will remember that, but do you remember Cindy afterwards saying: "I can't believe this macho bullshit."
Cindy: You steal my car, you rip the seat out, you kidnap me, you ask me to help you find your daughter which I very kindly do, and then you get me involved in a shoot out where people are dying and there's blood spurting all over the place, and then I watch you rip a phone booth out of a wall, swing from the ceiling like Tarzan, and then there's a cop that's going to shoot you and I save you and they start chasing me. Are you going to tell me what's going on or what?
Matrix: No.
Also, COMMANDO is quite a peculiar movie for the Reagan years, where heroes were all buffed-up soldiers, fighting (and especially killing) nameless, faceless foreigners. What makes Bennett (Vernon Wells) such a fascinating antagonist is that it's almost impossible to understand what he's supposed to mean. Is he supposed to be a prototypical Reagan era macho asshole? Is he homosexual and hot for Matrix (the guy IS dressed up like a Village People)? Is he a statement that homosexuality is grotesque and evil? We'll never know. What we know is that Bennett is devoured by an unexplainable jealousy of Matrix. He harbors violent, irrational feeling about him and Matrix keeps exploiting that for the entire movie. While Bennett is the embodiment of evil, he's not evil for the sake of being evil. There is something of a hurt child to him and that's what makes the confrontation with Matrix so visceral.
COMMANDO is what I call a perfect object, frozen in time. There is no way it can be improved, for it aged like good wine. It's a bit silly, the special effects are of the era and yet the narrative refuses to jump through conventional hoops and gives up unadulterated badassery instead. The closest contemporary narrative to COMMANDO's efficient use of the badass figure would be the Hawthorne series, for it doesn't bother with anything but killing bad guys. COMMANDO refuses to play by the rules and comes off as a true original film, despite the fact that it's basically ninety minutes of Arnold Schwarznegger wreaking havoc over the U.S West Coast. It gets self-awareness right. Hollywood must never reboot that movie. It would only taint its legacy. Leave John Matrix as he is and he will never grow old.
FIVE STARS