COMMANDO is a rare commodity – a Schwarzenegger picture on a low enough budget to feel like the early Seagal and Van Damme pictures. The good ones, though. Schwarzenegger plays John Matrix, the perfect name for an ex-special forces muscleman who lives in a cabin out in the woods with his daughter Alyssa Milano. (Who is the boss, anyway? I never did figure that out.) She doesn’t want him going on dangerous missions anymore so he stays home and spends his days chopping wood and feeding deer with her. Luckily, before he gets too bored with this Snow White lifestyle some other soldiers he used to be knee dip in the shit with kidnap his daughter as a way to force him to assassinate some South American leader or other. So he gets to go to war. And to be honest he looks more comfortable running around with camoflauge paint on then he does feeding a deer. We all have our little things we’re good at, you know.
If the deer feeding scene or Joel Silver’s name on the credits didn’t tip you off that this is gonna be a good one then the plane scene will. Matrix and one of the bad guys get on a commercial flight headed for the assassination. John Matrix – pretending to be way more high-maintenance than you would expect from a guy named John Matrix – asks a flight attendant for a pillow and blanket (no sleep mask though) and inquires how long the flight will be (about 11 hours). When no one is looking he snaps his captor’s neck, poses him with the pillow and blanket like he’s asleep, sneaks into the cargo hold and climbs out onto the landing gear just as the jet is taking flight. He jumps off as soon as he’s over swampland, lands safely and sets the timer on his watch for 11 hours. Ladies and gentlemen, COMMANDO.
So of course Matrix has to kill a bunch of guys to get to his daughter – the sweet simplicity of classical action movie structure. Nobody ever mentions Matrix’s giant muscles, which as usual he must’ve been born with since we never see him pumping iron. But because of his He-Man build he does alot of things a normal sized commando couldn’t do believably such as tear a seat out of a car, carry a huge log on his shoulder supported by one hand, carry a guy around by his ankle, pick up a phone booth with a guy in it and throw it, and push over a car that’s on its side. (Well, I guess that last one anybody could do, but they would be scared to do it.) Also he swings on some kind of streamer and jumps on top of an elevator. And later when he gets arrested Rae Dawn Chong rescues him by firing a rocket at the truck he’s in, so it blows up and he doesn’t. Because he’s John Matrix. (more…)
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John Cribbs over at thepinksmoke.com did a new interview with b-movie great Mark L. Lester. Lester doesn’t seem to get alot of credit or attention, but I figure if one guy directed COMMANDO, CLASS OF 1984, CLASS OF 1999 and SHOWDOWN IN LITTLE TOKYO then it can’t be a fluke. John uses the occasion to go through most of the Lesterography. He offers some interesting analysis of reoccurring themes and has me interested in checking out alot of the ones I haven’t seen, even some recent DTV suspense thrillers.
