I recall reading an interview with Schwarzenegger in my local newspaper circa 1985 where he said something along the lines of, "Young audiences now don't just want their good guys to be good, they also want them to be bad." Bad, as in badass. Or bad as in bad boy, verging on bully—like Clint Eastwood, an actor whose films Schwarzenegger had obviously studied, as if they were How-To manual for actors who had broad shoulders and a square jaw but not a lot of range. Schwarzenegger's predatory squint comes from Eastwood. So does his sneering delivery of kiss-off lines and his willingness to play characters so adept at killing that they seem more like John Carpenter horror movie stalker-creatures than traditional leading men. (Both Schwarzenegger and Eastwood have played many characters who get killed, in body or spirit, and then resurrected so that they can deal out death and snotty one-liners.) There was a tendency at the time to ascribe Schwarzenegger's fondness for cheeseball bon mots like "Don't disturb my friend, he's dead tired" and "Let off some steam" to a desire to imitate Bond (he would get his chance, sort of, in 1994's "True Lies"), but the self-satisfied quality is more Clint. When Schwarzenegger's Matrix tells David Patrick Kelly's Sully as he's hanging him off a cliff that "this is my weak arm," or quips upon leaving the hotel room where he killed Bill Duke's Green Beret that they're taking his car because "he won't be needing it," he's just being a jerk.
But he's a funny jerk—and the film's and Schwarzenegger's deadpans are so expertly judged that you don't tire of Matrix's "wit," much less disapprove of it. Tone is everything. "Commando" is as knowingly unreal as some of the best 1980s Hong Kong action classics. Like those films, this one is essentially a comedy with a body count; the bit where Matrix swings across a shopping mall atrium like Tarzan might be an homage to the most famous stunt in Jackie Chan's "Police Story." "Die Hard" cowriter Steven E. De Souza and "Class of 1984" director Mark Lester have a knack for setting up preposterous sight gags and groan-worthy jokes, then cutting away from them so quickly that you can't help but laugh. When Matrix and Rae Dawn Chong's intrepid flight attendant Cindy crash a car into a telephone pole, Lester quickly cuts to a tighter shot of Matrix asking, "Are you all right?", and of course she is.
This is the kind of movie where the hero realizes the bad guys have torn the cables out of his truck to prevent him from chasing them to rescue his daughter and puts the damned thing in neutral and drives it downhill, somehow dodging every tree; when he finally crashes and the truck obligatorily explodes, the movie cuts to Matrix sprinting away from the wreck. There are a lot of moments like those in "Commando"—moments where the film seems to have a crush on its own ludicrousness and is determined to keep the buzz going by never allowing the audience to look (or think) long enough to poke holes. Roger Ebert was fond of calling out this kind of Saturday morning serial logic (affectionately): Hopalong Cassidy appears to get buried in an avalanche at the end of a chapter, and at the start of the next one you see him riding along in the desert while the announcer says, "After Hoppy escaped from the canyon..."
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