Rating: 
Summary: If you like Schwarzenegger's action films this is a good one
Review: This movie is nearly twenty years old, but if you are a fan of Arnold Schwarzenegger's action movies this one is a lot of fun. Arnold plays retired commando John Matrix who is seeking a life in the mountains as a single dad with his daughter. Some of his enemies kidnap his daughter in order to compel him to assassinate the leader of a small country. He only has eleven hours to find a way to avoid their trap and save his daughter.Rae Dawn Chong, as flight attendant Cindy, finds herself pressed into the role of Matrix's sidekick and potential romantic interest. She has some comic lines commenting on the action along the way. She also happens to have the right car and the right skills to aid the plot at key points. Vernon Wells as arch villain Bennet, Dan Hedaya as the leader of the bad guys, Arius, and David Patrick Kelly as Sully are all fine villains and each added a lot to this movie. I loved seeing Bill Duke as Cooke. He has a great fight seen in this movie and is one of the best things in Predator. Fine actor and powerful screen presence. The daughter, Jenny Matrix, is played very effectively by Alyssa Milano who has gone on to have an active career in show business. Good for her! This isn't a great movie and many of the elements here are done better in "True Lies", but Arnold is young and strong here with lots of guns, explosions, and action. If you like that kind of thing, then this is a pretty fun time.
Rating:
Summary: If you want pure muscle action...this is it!
Review: Pure muscle action, appreciation of the body well made, good one liners, explosive music: a must if you want just action all the way without it being a brainer...a classic arnie that is difficult to beat in the flexing departement.
Rating: 
Summary: Commando (1985)
Review: Oh yeah, Arnie does it once more and delivers a full action packed film which is actually full of humor. From Arnie's "I had to let him go" joke and to the 100 soldiers killed by this living terminator, Commando has everything a Schwarzenegger fan wants. Okay, the Arnie's acting is as usual and the story is not so great, but who cares anyway?? As long as we Arnie fans see stupid soldiers who shoot 50 bullets at a target and still miss it get killed, we are the happiest people on earth.
Rating:
Summary: An-nuld kills everyone!
Review:
What I like most about "Commando" is its efficiency. No deep-meaning subtext, no dysfunctional relationship subplot, no social commentary or political leaning, just ACTION! From beginning to end, the story is being advanced, the mission is never strayed from. Sometimes, this film gets unfairly lumped in with typical low-budget `80's action fare, but "Commando" is superior to 99% of such movies.
It all starts out when some of Arnold's old military buddies get gunned down and his daughter (Alyssa Milano in her pre-hottie days) then gets kidnapped. The bad guys do this in order to try to force Arnold to assassinate a South American president. Of course, Arnold isn't going to play by their rules and makes his escape from the flight he was supposed to take.
He journeys from the airport (where he also winds up taking lovely Rae Dawn Chong as sort of a sexy/funny sidekick) to a mall to a car chase to a motel (with its requisite amorous couple next door) to a weapons store (that naturally sells rocket launchers) to a seaplane to the final showdown on an island full of henchmen. Along the way, he gets to spin out some one-liners at smarmy Sully (David Patrick Kelly) and tough guy Cooke (Bill Duke).
There, Arnold pretty much annihilates everything and everyone in his path before getting payback against the boss (Dan Hedaya, perhaps humorously cast as a Latin baddie) and his campy main muscle (Vernon Wells, strangely wearing another goofy S&M looking outfit, though thankfully not including the butt-less pants he fashioned in "The Road Warrior"). Love his crazy act when Arnold is tempting him to fight hand-to-hand; Wells starts acting like he's having an orgasm or crack fit or something hahaha!
"Commando" is right up an action-fan's alley; lots of henchmen getting wasted, Arnold, a pretty sidekick, explosions, corny but funny lines, etc., what more could a fan want? Typically, I reserve five star ratings for the greatest films ever (e.g. Casablanca, Raging Bull, etc.), but this one gets five stars for its fun factor.
Rating: 
Summary: Fun and Implausible
Review: "Commando" is one of those movies that I groan about when I think about it because it is so implausible, yet I seem to watch it without hesitation when it is on because it is a fun movie.
Arnold plays Colonel John Matrix, a former special operations team member. At the beginning of the movie we learn that former members of John's team are being killed one by one, and John must be next. Major General Franklin Kirby (James Olson, "The Andromeda Strain," "Polyanna,") provides a couple of men to protect John and his daughter Jenny (Alyssa Milano). Shortly after General Kirby leaves John smells something, but it's too late. The bad guys, led by supposedly dead Bennett (Vernon Wells), tell John that if he ever wants to see his daughter again he has to kill the president of a Central American country. Naturally John is a good guy and he is going to try and figure out how to get his daughter back, spreading murder and mayhem along the way.
The most implausible scene in the movie is near the beginning when John jumps from a jet into a marsh. There are several reasons this scene is implausible, and I groan each time I see it. First, the movie implies that the airport is LAX, and those marshes do not exist. Second, the jet shown would be traveling somewhere around 200 mph at the point john jumped from the plane, and yet he has hardly any forward motion at all. It's a wonderful scene, but physically impossible.
John quickly gets back into the terminal to find slimy bad guy Sully (David Patrick Kelly), enlisting the aid of Cindy (Rae Dawn Chong) along the way. I enjoy Cindy's role. After John rips a seat from her car and essentially kidnaps here she is afraid of John and in fear for her life, but as she sees how John behaves she decides to help him, and the two follow Sully to learn where Bennett and his daughter are.
Once John knows where his daughter is, John stops in at a local military and assault weapon store located somewhere in Los Angeles, where you can get anything you need from assault weapons and machine guns to limpet mines, anti-tank missiles and hand grenades (Weapons `R' Us maybe). After a humorous encounter with the police we learn that Cindy is learning to fly and the pair load up a small seaplane to invade the island containing hundreds of soldiers protecting the bad guys and keeping John from his daughter.
John manages to get on the island and booby trap it, and standing in an open area surrounded by enemy soldiers he kills them all with a machine gun without much more than a scratch, which is so implausible as to be funny. Eventually it comes down to a wonderful hand-to-hand battle between John and Bennett that has a great finish.
This movie could have been a disaster. However, the one-liners and the detailed characters make this movie enjoyable to watch even with its flaws. Rae Dawn Chong is beautiful and takes the initiative to save Arnold in at least one scene. She also gets a number of one-liners that break the tension and along with Arnold's one-liners this movie keeps from taking itself too seriously. Alyssa Milano is also a strong character, as you might expect from John Matrix's daughter, and she actively aids in her own rescue.
It seemed as though there were a lot of action movies in the 80s. Many of them did take themselves too seriously, and the result is that they were campy, unbelievable, and I find them difficult to watch today. "Commando" has some similarity to these movies in that the action is often implausible, and yet you feel good when John, Cindy and Jenny triumph over the bad guys and fly away into the sunset together. Watch this movie for action, fun and few good laughs. Go Gov!
Rating:
Summary: So great, I created a website dedicated to it!
Review: As a fan of the action genre, I've always held COMMANDO in the highest regard. Unlike the RAMBO films, Director Mark L. Lester didn't fall into the trap of taking his films too seriously. There is no overt political statement...just lots of killing. Also, Vernon Wells plays the wonderfully camp villain, Bennett. Since this is my favorite film, I also decided to create a website dedicated to it.
HTTP://WWW.COMMANDOFANS.COM
Rating:
Summary: Classic Arnold
Review: Arnold Schwarzenegger is Col. John Matrix, recently retired from some sort of military special-ops career (in which he was, of course, the best there was), and now living in a cabin in the hills with his little girl (Alyssa Milano). She'll be crushed if he has to go back into action again, and he promises he won't. But somebody is killing the members of his old unit one by one, and they may be coming for him next.
Sure enough, not long into the film, his daughter has been kidnapped. And the bad guys explain that they'll return her if he'll just perform one teeny-tiny little assassination . . .
That's the setup; the rest of the plot consists primarily of Arnold kicking a$$. That's what you wanted to see, isn't it? If not, skip this film.
But if you like this sort of thing -- as, obviously, I do -- _Commando_ will be one of your favorites (if it isn't already). Would you like to see Arnold 'drive' a sabotaged pickup truck by shoving it down a mountain and hopping in? Disembark from a jet aircraft while it's taking off? Pick up a phone booth while it's got a bad guy in it? Deliver classic lines like 'I'll be back' and 'Trust me'? Do all of the foregoing while whomping the behinds of some unambiguously evil bad guys? This is your movie.
The major villain -- Bennett, played by Vernon Wells -- looks and sounds as though he'd accidentally wandered in from the set of _Mad Max_. But you weren't watching this for its gritty realism, were you?
Rae Dawn Chong is in it too, as the 'feisty stewardess' that appears in so many of these films (see Halle Berry in _Executive Decision_ for one of the more recent). She gets a few of the good lines, and she even gets to fire a rocket launcher.
But the show belongs to the Gubernator. This is classic Schwarzenegger.
Rating:
Summary: Yep its good and don't let the title fool you
Review: Arnold Schwarzenegger stars in this action classic as Colonel John Matrix. As the ex-head of a special forces team, he is forced back into action in order to find his kidnapped daughter - and do his enemy's work!
Rating:
Summary: "I eat Green Berets for breakfast."
Review: This movie is so awsome. The only thing that's actually bad about it is some of the acting and the music. James Horner is an excellent compuser, but what the h*ll was he thinking when he wrote this score? It's like some sort of Jamiacan music with a saxaphone and synthesized drum beats. Anyway, it's got some great lines and action scenes. Arnold manages to take out an entire private army single handed, in about 20 minutes. Look for Bill Paxton playing a short roll as an air traffic control officer.
Rating:
Summary: 90 minutes of pure Ah-nuld awesomeness
Review: This one of those movies that doesn't need a plausible, intelligent plot to be an amazing and awesome movie. In fact, it kicks ass more than a great deal of intelligent movies! But I digress, Commando is awesome. The story is that a deposed dictator and a group of renegade military thugs kidnap Schwarzeneggar's daughter and will only give her back alive if he assassinates the dictator's country's president in less than 24 hours. After given this warning, he boards a plane with a thug watching his every move, but while sitting down he loses his focus on Arnold and starts to relax, then Arnold leans forwards, swings his massive forearms back as hard as he can (knocking the thug out), and breaks his neck, and no one notices! He then jumps off the moving plane into a puddle like he jumped 6 feet. That's just a taste of how the implausibility of this movie is what makes it incredible in the end. The prime example of this is the last half hour of the movie when Arnold storms the dictator's island hideaway and takes out a whole army by himself, like a first-person shooter with god mode on. Insane. I won't spoil the rest, this movie kicks ass, watch it!
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