Commando

When I say the word Commando, what is the first thing that comes to your mind?  If you thought ‘not wearing any underwear’ than may I suggest you are disgusting, and I hope you wash your pants hourly.  If you thought of a man picking up cars, ripping out car seats, killing people with pitchforks and razorblades, using flowers as suitable cover from gunfire, and stopping a secret Mexican military gathering off the coast of California, then me and you, we are on the same wave-length.  Commando, one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first action movies, is just… terrible.  Not terrible in a Hard Target kind of way, but something of a different nature altogether.

Plot:

Synopsis: Bill Duke (an Arnold regular), the bad guy from Innerspace (who inexplicably wears chain mail armor and leather pants), Dan Hedaya, and a few other goofballs decides that these Chinese sons of a bitches are going down (not really).  They need Arnold to assassinate some guy (the leader of Val Verde, a fake South American country) and in order to ensure that he goes through with it, they kidnap Alyssa Milano (who happens to be his daughter).  They give him an ultimatum, kill this random guy, or Alyssa Milano dies.  Now at this point it must be said, that in the 11 hours it is supposed to take for Arnold to fly from California to Val Verde, he does the following: Kills the guy watching him on the plane, jumps off the plane, follows Sully to a mall by kidnapping a flight attendant, witnesses an illegal transaction involving passports, beats up a bunch of cops, rips a phone booth out of the ground, gets hit by a car, drops Sully off a cliff, picks up Sully’s Porsche, tells Bill Duke that he eats Green Berets for breakfast, kills Bill Duke (with boobies, yay!), discovers a secret army base in California, robs a gun store, gets arrested, has his police van get hit by a rocket (shot by the lovely flight attendant who tells him she read the instructions…apparently she has no qualms about potentially murdering him and two cops), is OK, steals a plane, and flies to wherever Dan Hedaya’s secret army is hiding.  Now, Dan Hedaya wants to kill the leader of Val Verde because he wants to take power, if Arnold can do all this in the time it takes a jumbo jet to fly from California to Val Verde, (including fly from California to wherever Dan Hedaya is) how far is Dan Hedaya’s army from Val Verde?  My guess is 10 hours by plane, and the last time I checked, the army only had a crappy sea plane as their air force, how the hell was he planning on taking over Val Verde?  Was he going to take a navy (not seen), also he had a lot of heavy arms in his secret army base (A.K.A. a warehouse in southern California)?  I don’t think even in the 80’s you could bring automatic weapons on commercial flights.  Not to mention, once Arnold gets on the island he proceeds to destroy the entire Dan Hedayan army in under 15 minutes.  Also, the army consists of around 80 people. I would like to hope the Val Verdian army could stop 80 guys, even if one of them had chain mail armor.   Arnold uses flowers for cover and bullets whizz by his unflinching poses.  Arnold takes a little bit of damage as the petunia’s he’s using for cover are not grenade proof, a fact he must have forgotten.  So he takes refuge in a shed, and proceeds shove a pitchfork into a guys chest, throw a razor into a guy’s head, and chop off another guys arm with a machete.  Arnold then quickly disposes of Dan Hedaya, and moves on to Bennett, the two tussle, and in the end Arnold throws a pipe through him, puncturing a hole through a steam valve, causing Arnold to utter the line “let off some steam.”  So the bad guys are thwarted, and Arnold is the hero, all is well, save for the trail of bodies Arnold has left behind.

At no point when watching this movie do you ever think that it is good.  However, you quickly realize that this might be the worst thing you have ever seen, and it is OK, because it is so bad it is funny.  You can relax and put down the remote because the movie is so bad it is unintentionally hilarious.  I would recommend watching this movie Mystery Science Theater 3000 style, if you watch it alone, it loses its luster, and if caught watching it, can lead to some pretty ridiculous statements, such as:

Oh, I didn’t know you were home, or don’t you knock?, or I JUST turned on the TV and this was on, or I had an itch (what?).

I give this movie my should see rating; however, it comes with a disclaimer, you must be an open individual who can laugh at bad movies.  If you can, you will find a real comedic gem disguised as a terrible action movie.  This is Arnold’s first foray into comedy, so cut him some slack.