It's not a good film at all, just entertaining if you have a certain mind-set and value system.

wonder2wonder, I'm assuming you left out Sully's AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!! when Matrix drops him because it's not really dialogue???

@mechajutaro said:

Not terribly funny but indicative of Arnie and that which was pat in 80s action films:

Bill Duke: "This Green Beret's gonna kick your a-s."

Governator: "I eat Green Beret's for breakfast."

I wonder if that dialogue has homoerotic subtext. Much of the film does, according to this amusing reading of the film:

Enormously enjoyable though Commando is on the surface, what's most entertaining about it in retrospect is its hilariously blatant gay subtext, which I presume was intentional (whether or not Arnie was in on the joke). Consider: all the considerable acreage of bare flesh on display is not only male (Arnie's cleavage gets much more exposure than Rae Dawn Chong's!), but mostly glistening with sweat, veins throbbing beneath the surface, and although there's a token female lead, Matrix shows no romantic or sexual interest towards her whatsoever - even in the final shot, when she beams at him, he remains stolidly impassive.

Consider further: the film's structure is strongly reminiscent of a porno movie, in which Matrix has a series of one-on-one encounters with increasingly beefy men, from the small, slight, faintly effeminate Sully (David Patrick Kelly) to the rather more chunky (Bill Duke, looking for all the world like a Robert Mapplethorpe model), culminating in the full-on grappling session with Bennett (Vernon Wells), whose personality traits can be summed up in two words: "leather" and "moustache" (or possibly "Freddie" and "Mercury") - all interspersed with shots of Matrix striding across the lawn, aggressively phallic weapon in hand, spraying bullets and oddly testicular grenades everywhere with orgasmic abandon (and as for that last shot of Bennett... I won't spoil it, but you won't forget it in a hurry!). You want more proof? Just listen to his very first line - in which he reveals he reads magazine articles about Boy George! And what exactly does he mean when he claims "I eat Green Berets for breakfast"?

There is of course the question of his daughter, but I think it's pretty clear that she was adopted - not only is there no physical resemblance whatsoever, but if he had a say in her christening, why did he pick a name he has such obvious difficulty pronouncing? ("Chenny") There's also no mention of her mother, so the most reasonable explanation is that Jenny is the sole survivor of one of Matrix's earlier massacres, and that he's protecting her out of a sense of profound guilt.

https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/10999-commando/discuss/589af0b3c3a3683aa6004e96

These guys eat too much red meat!

@mechajutaro said:

@Satch_the_man said:

It's not a good film at all, just entertaining if you have a certain mind-set and value system.

Admittedly, I did find the movie to be a solid enough popcorn flick thus fall into this camp you speak of. What sort of mind set and value system are we talkin' 'bout here, Satch?

A mind-set and value system that enjoys violence! And the visual destruction of the human body!!

"I'm just so tired of all these Star Wars."

True story - my mate met Vernon Wells and thought it'd be funny to say "Let off some steam Bennett" to him, to which Wells replied "Yeah alright mate, leave it out" He's probably had enough of that over the last 30 odd years...!

"Let off some steam Bennett" (after killing him with a pipe that has, of course, steam coming out of it).

This film is such a guilty pleasure, as if arnie walking in an open ground wouldn't get hit with multiple machine guns firing at him!

Works every time!