There is a persistent snobbery in film writing that treats absurdity as failure. A movie is silly, therefore it is bad, therefore the only honest response is a smirk. I want to argue the opposite using a picture that has been smirked at for decades: Mark L. Lester’s Commando is not a bad film that accidentally became fun. It is a well-engineered piece of pop cinema that knows exactly how ridiculous it is and builds its entire structure around that knowledge. The distinction matters, because most absurd action films are genuinely terrible, and understanding why this one is not tells you something about how the genre works.
The Case for Deliberate Excess
Realism is not a virtue in itself. It is a technique, useful when a film’s pleasures depend on the audience believing that consequences are real. Plenty of great action cinema works this way. But there is a second tradition, older than movies, where the pleasure comes from watching a figure of impossible capability move through a world designed to be broken by him. That is not a failed attempt at realism. It is a different form, closer to a tall tale or a cartoon, and it has its own rigor.
The rigor is this: an absurd action film has to be absurd consistently, confidently, and at a controlled temperature. If it wobbles into self-mockery, the stakes collapse and you are watching a joke that lasts ninety minutes. If it takes itself seriously, the audience laughs at it rather than with it, and every beat of tension curdles. The narrow lane between those failures is where Commando lives, and staying in that lane for the length of a feature is much harder than it looks. The number of imitators that have failed at it is the proof.
How the Film Holds Its Tone
Watch how the movie introduces its hero. It does not open with combat. It opens with domesticity: a father and daughter feeding deer, eating ice cream, horsing around. The sequence is played warmly and at length. It establishes two things at once, and the second is the clever one. First, it gives the plot its motive. Second, it tells you the register. A film that spends its opening minutes on ice cream is telling you it will not be grim.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s performance is the load-bearing element, and it is a performance, not just a physique. He plays the entire film with a flat, unbothered calm, as though the events are mildly inconvenient rather than harrowing. That choice is what makes the excess funny instead of ugly. When a character is visibly straining, violence reads as desperation. When he is not straining at all, it reads as physics being politely suspended. The one-liners work for the same reason: they are delivered without relish, as observations rather than punchlines, which is far funnier than a wink.
Rae Dawn Chong is the other essential piece, and she is undervalued. Her function is to react like a person from our world who has been dropped into this one. She is frightened, sarcastic, and repeatedly appalled, and her appallment is the film’s release valve. Without her, the tone would be airless. With her, the audience has somewhere to put its disbelief, and the film can keep escalating without ever having to acknowledge the escalation itself.
What Separates the Good Absurd From the Bad
A few principles that this film observes and its many imitators do not:
- Escalation with shape. The set pieces get bigger in a legible order, and each introduces a new constraint before removing it. Bad absurd action delivers maximum spectacle immediately and then has nowhere to go.
- Clarity over chaos. Lester shoots the action so you always know the geography: who is where, what the objective is, what the obstacle is. Cheap imitations disguise incoherence as intensity.
- Brevity. The film is short and knows it should be. Absurdity has a half-life. Two and a half hours of this would be unbearable.
- A real emotional spine, however simple. The stakes are elementary but sincere. The film never mocks the father-daughter relationship, which is precisely why it can mock everything else.
- Villains pitched to match. Vernon Wells plays his antagonist as pure theatrical appetite, all grin and chainmail, and the performance matches the film’s temperature exactly.
That last point is worth expanding. Tonal matching across performances is the thing amateur productions most often botch. Put one actor doing gritty naturalism next to one doing pantomime and the film has no center. Here, every performance sits on the same shelf.
The Complaint
My reservation is substantial and it concerns the film’s politics of casualness, specifically the way it handles the deaths of ordinary, non-combatant people.
Absurd action films buy their license by keeping violence in an unreal zone. The bodies are props, the enemies are abstractions, nothing has weight. Commando mostly maintains that contract, but it breaks it in a handful of moments involving people who are not soldiers and have not signed up for the film’s rules. A killing carried out casually against someone essentially incidental, played for a quip, sits badly and keeps sitting badly. It is not that the film should be moralistic. It is that it has established a world where consequence does not apply, and then briefly asks us to enjoy a consequence applied to someone who belongs to the real world.
There is a related problem in the final act, where the film’s body count becomes so undifferentiated that the tension flattens out. The climax is spectacular but monotonous in a way the earlier sequences are not, because the earlier sequences had specific problems to solve and the last one mostly does not. If you find your attention drifting in the closing stretch, that is the film’s fault, not yours. The best absurd action keeps posing puzzles even at maximum volume, and this one stops.
Why It Lasts
Because it is honest about what it is. There is no pretension in it, no gesture toward significance, no attempt to launder its pleasures as something loftier. It offers a specific and legitimate experience, delivers it efficiently, and gets out. That confidence is rarer than competence.
The film has also aged into something its makers could not have planned: a document of an entire mode of eighties action filmmaking at its purest. Everything the decade did with this genre is here in concentrated form, unembarrassed and undiluted. Later films in this tradition became either self-aware or apologetic. This one is neither. It simply believes in itself with a straight face while inviting you to laugh, and the combination is much stranger and more skillful than its reputation as a guilty pleasure suggests.
Take the “guilty” off. The pleasure is the point, and the craft that produces it is real craft. Judge it against what it is trying to do, which is what we owe any film, and it is close to exemplary. Judge it against something it never intended to be and you have learned nothing except that you were watching with the wrong instrument.
