BE KIND, BE PREPARED, BAD GUYS MIGHT BE PICKING UP YOUR GARBAGE. He’s so unimpeachably good that if he ends up killing a few hundred third world-henchmen it’s only because he had to. John Matrix is Hulk Hogan telling you to stay in school and take your vitamins. If you wanted to turn Reagan’s signature phrase, “trust, but verify,” into a visual metaphor, you couldn’t do much better than deer feeding after karate class.
#COMMANDO ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER SHOTGUN CRACK#
He teaches her karate, and then they begin hand-feeding deer, a scene that never, ever fails to crack me up.
She pushes some ice cream into his face and he laughs and laughs. Arnold, playing “John Matrix” (a name about as close to “Joe Good Guy” as you could get), and his daughter Jenny (“Jenny Matrix”), played by Alyssa Milano, get into tickle fights as string music swells. This leads into a magnificent montage sequence that takes “idyllic existence” well beyond parody. It turns out, Arnold is just carrying entire tree trunks around his property, as one does. We see Arnold’s glistening bicep before we see his face, all while a weird, porny synth track plays (courtesy of James Horner, who’d win an Academy Award two years later, for Aliens). This leads to Arnold’s introduction, one of the most homoerotic sequences ever captured on film. It’s going to take a really good guy to defeat them. As the salesman tries to convince him why he should get vinyl seats instead of leather, Duke runs him over while driving the car out the front window. In the very next scene, Bill Duke is in a Cadillac dealership. He falls down and Bill Duke calmly walks up to him and shoots him about 12 more times in the chest, just to be sure. “Don’t worry… we won’t,” Duke says, at which point the fake garbage men pull out Uzis and shoot the guy in the chest about 30 times. “I was afraid you’d miss me,” he tells the garbage men, led by Bill Duke. (Were action sequences interrupting hot ladies in bed a thing before the ’80s? Michael Bay proudly continues this tradition today.) Hearing the garbage truck, he goes outside to make sure they pick up his trash. The first scene involves a guy waking up in bed with a hot lady. The first scenes establish the easy, breezy morality of the Commando universe. Perhaps because of this, Commando is also one of the most blatantly homoerotic films ever made (with all due respect to Rocky 3). Solving any problem was merely a matter of acting manlier. In Commando, Arnold is the unqualified fulfillment of everything we wanted him to be - invincible (because he was so big and strong!), uncompromising, clever, merciless towards bad guys, up to any task, but desirous only of peace, quiet, and family. Arnold is always the hero in his own story. Arnold never reflects, and is virtually unshameable, because he’s never embarrassed.
#COMMANDO ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER SHOTGUN MOVIE#
Being a superpower was a good thing! We had to be big and strong to protect the world from communism! Arnold Schwarzenegger - big, strong, shameless - was a movie star so tailor-made for ’80s America that it didn’t even matter that he was an Austrian whose father was a Nazi. We’d finally gotten over Watergate and were sick of self-examination, and Ronald Reagan, a former B-movie babyface, tapped into a collective desire to feel like the world’s white hat again. It’s like seeing garage footage of Guns N’ Roses the first time they truly rocked.Īmerica loves Schwarzenegger, but never more so than in the ’80s. Everything Arnold would eventually come to be - the family-friendly father figure of Kindergarten Cop, the goofball from Twins, the A-list action hero of Total Recall, and the simultaneous Cool Dad/Murder Robot of Terminator 2 - exists in rough draft form in Commando. Mark Lester didn’t need to read a script, because Commando had Schwarzenegger, and Schwarzenegger was enough.Ĭommando is raw Schwarzenegger.
I said, “Fabulous, can I read the script?” He said, “No, if you read the script you’re not gonna want to do the movie.” He said he had this script, and maybe I could direct it. I was at the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” Playboy Mansion party, sitting in my pajamas next to Joel Silver. How beautifully ’80s is Commando? Lester agreed to direct it while sitting next to Joel Silver at a Playboy Mansion pajama party. Lester (who’d directed Firestarter, his first major studio picture, the year before), feels like the first, and the ultimate “Arnold Schwarzenegger Movie.” He’d been in two Conan movies and was fresh off The Terminator, and was well on his way to bigger things, having succeeded mainly in proving that he could look like Arnold Schwarzenegger on film, which was a desirable quality in and of itself. In 1985, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a giant buff dude, but he wasn’t quite a star.
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