Movie Review: "Commando" (1985)

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Movie: "Commando"
Director: Mark L. Lester
Year: 1985
Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

A retired Black Ops team starts to get picked off one by one. Their retired leader, John Matrix (Arnold Schwarzenegger), is informed by his former boss General Kirby (James Olsen) of what is going on. It isn't long before these killers come for him. The man behind it all is a former South American dictator named Arius (Dan Hedaya). He and his hired team kidnap Martrix's daughter Jenny (Alyssa Milano) to use as a hostage to blackmail Matrix into doing a job. They want him to murder the current president of Arius' former country so he can create a coupe and return to power, but Matrix has other ideas on how to get his daughter back. 

"Commando" is a guilty pleasure of ours and one we don't really feel bad about because it's so short. We say guilty pleasure because by most standards, it wouldn't be a good movie. The plot is thin, contrived and cliché. The dialogue is very cheesy, too, and a lot of the action is over the top to the point of being ludicrous. But, despite all this, we still have a pretty good time when we watch this film. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays John Matrix, a bad ass special forces black ops soldier who is a one-man army. Realistically, you could put this character description in just about every Arnold Schwarzenegger role ever created and it probably wouldn't be too far off from one another. After his daughter Jenny, played by a young Alyssa Milano, is kidnapped, John is put on a plane to South America for an assassination mission, but he jumps off the flight in spectacular fashion, giving him 11 hours, the amount of time before the plane lands, to find his daughter and rescue her. From there he kidnaps a stewardess, played by Rae Dawn Chong, and then steals her car and proceeds to wreck the crap out of it. John tells her about his kidnapped daughter, so by proxy, she is okay with being kidnapped and having her car destroyed. In fact, she is so okay with it that she agrees to help him try and get Jenny back from the bad guys. LAUGHABLE. Matrix cuts down his targets one by one, more or less stumbling on clues as to where his daughter is being held. He busts into an army surplus store which luckily has a massive stash of illegal military grade weapons he can use! Yassss!! Now loaded with the arsenal of a small country on his back, he can try and save his daughter. He gears up with some army boots and army pants, and also throws on a combat vest that offers no real protection other than properly showing off another type of gun show: his glistening muscles (in true Arnold Schwarzenegger form). He smears on some black grease paint camouflage, and since he's attacking in the middle of the day, it doesn't hide him one damn bit, but it does make him look properly cool. He's outnumbered about 100-1, but it doesn't matter, because he's John Matrix, and no matter how surrounded he is, no matter how many people are shooting at him in every which direction, no matter how out in the open he is, John Matrix is untouchable because, let's face it, this is the 80's and it's an action movie. #MURICA!!! This also means a slew of witty one-liners are to be had at any given time, and this movie has a lot of them. Come on, now, nobody delivers them like Arnold does! Like we said earlier, despite all of its obvious flaws, on the surface, it is still a relatively good watch. It never fails to make us laugh.

My Rating: 6.5/10
BigJ's Rating: 6/10
IMDB's Rating: 6.7/10
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 69%
Do we recommend this movie:  Sure, why not?
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One year ago, we were watching: "Edge of Tomorrow"