If you have never been exposed to the glory that is Commando then, truly, you haven't lived. Picture your average late-eighties, over-the-top action film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Commando is the absolute epitome of that. And also the zenith: it's an Arnie film with more gratuitous shots of his rippling muscles, more cheesy one-liners, more disregard for reality, and a higher body count than ever other late-eighties, over-the-top action film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger combined. It's incredible. Plus it stars Alyssa Milano as his kidnapped younger daughter, which is hilarious. Commando starts as it means to go on. After a prologue that sees some guy killed for putting out his bins on the wrong day (or something) we get straight into things as ex-commando John Matrix - played by Arnie, obviously - has his beloved daughter snatched, so he can be blackmailed into helping stage a military coup in a fictional Middle Eastern country. He does not go along with this plan. Instead he kills everyone involved and then has less than a day to find and rescue his progeny, before the plane he was supposed to be on lands. So he gets to work. And by "gets to work" we mean KILLS EVERYONE. He drops someone off a cliff. He throws knives in people's heads. He shoots people. He throws a pipe through the main villain at the end and tells him to "let off some steam". That's after he's invaded the bad guy's island base and killed literally every soldier in it, during a sequence that averages, like, ten deaths a minute. By the end of play he has killed 81 people single-handedly. The bad guys? Two. Overkill, sure, but entertaining overkill.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
