There's nothing wrong with escapism from time to time, but Commando probably goes a bit too far into fantasy for its own good. Granted, we all need to watch films sometimes purely for the sake of entertainment - not every film has to have the realism of Platoon, the moral dilemmas of Hamlet, or the meticulous accuracy of Gandhi. However, Commando is so uproariously far-fetched, and manoeuvres its hero into such wildly implausible situations, that it ultimately shoots itself in the foot. How can you get even slightly excited when from the very first scenes the good guy is shown to be indestructible?
Ex green-beret John Matrix (Arnold Schwarzenegger) lives in an isolated mountain lodge with his daughter Jenny (Alyssa Milano). Some years earlier, he was the leader of a crack army unit sent on only the most dangerous of assignments. He is visited by an old pal, Maj. Gen Franklin Kirby (James Olson), who warns him to be on guard as members of his former unit have recently been murdered. Soon, Matrix too finds himself targeted, but the bad guys don't want him dead. Instead, they kidnap his daughter and tell him that in order to get her back he must pull off an assassination for them.
The film basically shows how Matrix single-handedly rescues his daughter from a guerrilla army. We are treated to various stunts and scenes of destruction as he races against time to get her back. He leaps from a plane and free-falls hundreds of feet into a swamp; he raids a weapons store and steals an arsenal of weaponry to help him in his quest; he escapes with nary a scratch from an armoured police van which is blown up by a rocket launcher. In an outrageous finale, he wipes out thousands of soldiers who are guarding his daughter's prison. It's all very easy to watch, and since it was never intended to be realistic it feels churlish to knock the film for its low credibility. But even mindless action films have to generate excitement, at least on their own terms. And this one is awfully dumb. The excitement is non-existent, because Arnie is so preposterously invulnerable that even a thousand-man army can't slow him down. Commando is simply empty, mindless spectacle which scores highly on destruction but offers precious little else.
Ex green-beret John Matrix (Arnold Schwarzenegger) lives in an isolated mountain lodge with his daughter Jenny (Alyssa Milano). Some years earlier, he was the leader of a crack army unit sent on only the most dangerous of assignments. He is visited by an old pal, Maj. Gen Franklin Kirby (James Olson), who warns him to be on guard as members of his former unit have recently been murdered. Soon, Matrix too finds himself targeted, but the bad guys don't want him dead. Instead, they kidnap his daughter and tell him that in order to get her back he must pull off an assassination for them.
The film basically shows how Matrix single-handedly rescues his daughter from a guerrilla army. We are treated to various stunts and scenes of destruction as he races against time to get her back. He leaps from a plane and free-falls hundreds of feet into a swamp; he raids a weapons store and steals an arsenal of weaponry to help him in his quest; he escapes with nary a scratch from an armoured police van which is blown up by a rocket launcher. In an outrageous finale, he wipes out thousands of soldiers who are guarding his daughter's prison. It's all very easy to watch, and since it was never intended to be realistic it feels churlish to knock the film for its low credibility. But even mindless action films have to generate excitement, at least on their own terms. And this one is awfully dumb. The excitement is non-existent, because Arnie is so preposterously invulnerable that even a thousand-man army can't slow him down. Commando is simply empty, mindless spectacle which scores highly on destruction but offers precious little else.