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A lot of people see Commando as one of those guilty pleasures in life, but really what is there to feel guilty about? Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as John Matrix and demonstrates how to kill bad guys in every possible way imaginable, and for sheer entertainment value it definitely ranks up there as one of the best in its genre.

Simply put, Commando is fucking awesome. Movies these days are so obsessed with in-depth plots and character development, in satisfying the artistic tastes of the movie snobs, that they're sometimes a chore to watch. What ever happened to having a a few beers with the lads, scratching your nuts, and watching a mountain of muscle blow shit up just for the sake of it?

In case you're missing the point, people really didn't give a damn about standards in the '80s. If some big Austrian dude pretended to care about his daughter getting kidnapped just so he got the opportunity to wipe out a majority of the human race, then the authorities would give him the go ahead.

It's perhaps ironic then that the movie opens in such a camp fashion with Arnie being chased around the woods by his daughter, and then finding it in his heart to feed a wild deer (aww, bless him). But before we have even time to think what the former Mr. Universe Champion would look like in a leotard, the bad guys have snatched his daughter and he's heading for the rifle shed. What follows is absolute carnage: John Matrix rapidly becomes the pinnacle of machoism and will stop at nothing to take back what is his. Somewhere... somehow... someone is going to pay for what they did. Oh, boy.

These days, of course, it is common knowledge to us what happens to the people that mess with Arnold Schwarzenegger, but in 1985 the bad guys weren't quite so clued up. The action scenes in Commando are so outlandish and manage to captivate the audience in such a way that it is enough to make a grown man ejaculate in his pants from sheer nonsensical excitement.

Now, I've seen a lot of action movies -- some even with respectable plots and emotionally charged characters (gasp!) -- but none have managed to cram as much action and dry wit into an eighty-eight minute film as Commando has.

One shouldn't be embarrassed to admit the pleasure that "comes" with watching Commando. How many movies offer the sight of a man jumping off a plane without a parachute in mid-flight, him then swinging from one side of a shopping centre to the other, ripping out an innocent lady's car seat, dangling a guy by one leg off a cliff, walking right through the front door of military headquarters as a one man wrecking machine, cutting off part of a man's head with a saw blade, committing murder with a garden rake, and then proceeding to throw a steel pipe (with one hand) through a guy's chest? Not many, I'd say.

It is with such elements considered that I regard  Commando as one of the best action films that I've ever seen. No one eats green berets for breakfast quite like Arnie does.

(C) Andy Carrington, 2008.