#commando movie

Vidyut Jammwal - Commando 2: The Black Money Trail (2017)

WHY IT’S A PLEASURE:  … in just as many ways that’s the film’s biggest strengths – Schwarzenegger’s never gonna be Shakespearean acting material (no matter what The Last Action Hero may have to say on the matter), but he’s a master at what he does, and he does it with winning aplomb here. Like the actor himself, the character of John Matrix is an archetypal force of nature, an unstoppable killing machine of solid muscle and vengeful fury who’ll stop at nothing to kill the baddies and save his little girl.  Rae Dawn Chong keeps the film from descending into utter parody with a winningly exasperated performance as Cindy, the air hostess Matrix ropes into helping him out, providing the audience with a grounding anchor throughout the film’s increasingly choppy narrative waters; a decidedly pre-Charmed Alyssa Milano, meanwhile, is a total sweetheart we have no trouble caring about as her situation grows increasingly dire, while the brilliant Dan Hedaya and a selection of cartoonish bad guys (most notably Predator’s Bill Duke and The Warriors’ David Patrick Kelly, both very memorable) provide Matrix with a “healthy” supply of cannon fodder to mow down … but the clear standout show-stopping, scene-stealing turn here comes from The Road Warrior’s Vernon Wells, whose truly unhinged turn as the thoroughly psychotic Bennett provided 80s cinema with one of its very best villains.  Director Mark Lester was one of the masters of kitsch, trashy lowbrow popcorn fare in the 80s and early 90s (particular highlights from his CV include Class of 1984 and its sci-fi quasi-sequel Class of 1999, Showdown in Little Tokyo, the criminally underrated Stephen King adap Firestarter and John Candy’s action comedy Armed & Dangerous), but this is rightly regarded as the zenith of his career, and I STILL consider it to be the VERY BEST of Schwarzenegger’s non-franchise-based work (only The Running Man – ALSO penned by screenwriter Steven E. De Souza – and Red Heat come close to it).  It’s definitely big, loud, dumb fun, but there’s a kind of fiendish intelligence at work here – there’s no fat to this lean, mean thrill machine with its unrelenting, wire-taut atmosphere and high velocity ticking-clock pacing, and there’s impressive logic to the action, with every one of the consistently spectacular (if also sometimes pretty BONKERS) set-pieces proving surprisingly necessary to the plot. It’s also got a singularly AWESOME score, easily the best of James Horner’s very distinctive 80s action compositions, that further fuels one of the most distinctive, intoxicating and thoroughly engrossing roller-coasters of the decade’s most OTT genre.  Most importantly, this is also one of my very biggest personal guilty pleasures EVER …