After the murder of his friend General Kirby (James Olson), John Matrix (Arnold Schwarzenegger) joins forces with industrialist Andrew McCarren to go after his killer, drug lord Nestor Pedrosa.
As Matrix gets deeper into McCarren’s inner circle, he finds himself at the centre of a conspiracy that connects Pedrosa, Kirby and his new benefactor, McCarren…
Commando is one of my favourite movies. When I was first studying screenwriting, I kept circling back to it because of how ridiculously simple it was.
Commando is defined by its cartoonlike simplicity. It is a movie that is completely aware of its potential limitations. It does not step outside what it can do, and what it does, it does with a cheeky earnestness that avoids falling into self-parody.
Commando has a straightforward plot and a cast of clearly defined villains. It also does not burden its leading man with a character with too much interiority. Matrix just wants to get his daughter back.
It is a good fun time. It works absolutely fine on its own terms.
When I first heard that the sequel’s script was in the wild, it was in the middle of COVID. I downloaded it but never got around to reading it (other more immediate things were taking up my attention). After reviewing the unmade Halloween IV draft, I was keen to review more unmade scripts, and I finally got to crack this epic open.
First things first - there is a rumour that Die Hard was originally meant to serve as the basis of the sequel. That might just be the result of both movies featuring action sequences in office buildings, because they share few other similarities.
Written by original scribe Steven E. DeSouza and Frank Darabont, this draft of Commando II (dated February 6, 1989) is a far bigger, and weirder, story than its predecessor.
It is such a smorgasbord of different ideas and tones - on the one hand, we have massive set-pieces and hi-tech gadgets; on the other hand, a darker take on the genre’s politics, and personal trauma for hero John Matrix.
It feels like a reflection of the expectations of a sequel, Schwarzenegger’s growing profile, and new trends in the action genre.
In some respects, the film feels like a familiar sequel - we get a couple of minor callbacks to the first movie (a return cameo from the mall security guards), an ally-turned-villain, and a finale set in a foreign dictator’s private playpen.
The film’s second act transforms into a cyber-siege thriller, as Matrix builds a new security system (complete with automated laser cannons) for McCarren’s corporate headquarters, which he then has to batter through in order to rescue his new friend, lawyer Melinda (a poor replacement for Rae Dawn Chong’s Cindy).
The shift toward high technology and gadgets feels like the film’s attempt to meet Schwarzenegger’s success with more high-concept genre fare (The Running Man and Predator were in the recent rear-view when this movie was being written).
The script also makes attempts to deepen its hero, and force him to confront the corruption and hypocrisy of the system and country he is fighting for.
In a mid-film twist, the ultimate big bad is revealed to be Matrix’s old commanding officer, General Franklin Kirby.
As played by James Olson, he is presented as a gentle, fatherly authority figure. He provides little real support, and becomes a hype man for Matrix as he goes on his rampage.
In this script, he is a Cold War zealot who is so paranoid about communism in South America that he has allied himself with drug lord Nestor Pedrosa and billionaire McCarren to supply arms to fight the supposed red menace. Midway through the script, it is revealed that he has faked his death (ala Bennett in the original) so that he can continue selling drugs to finance his privatised Cold War.
As written, he is a world away from the character played by Olson. He is a single-minded sociopath who is completely assured of his own righteousness. During the climax, he gets a horrific facial injury, with part of his lip and skin torn away, giving him a permanent, skeletal grin.
What makes his betrayal hit even harder is that he has fabricated evidence to make Matrix look like the head of the drug smuggling operation.
While Kirby’s betrayal is clearly influenced by the real-world scandal of the Iran-Contra affair, it also reflects one of the ways in which this script tries to explore Matrix’s vulnerabilities. In this respect, the script’s attempts at character development feel like a reaction to another contemporary shift, in the action genre itself: the rise of a new kind of action hero, with the less hard-bodied and more emotionally tortured Martin Riggs (Lethal Weapon) and John McClane (Die Hard).
While he remains physically impervious, Matrix’s belief in his adopted country is put under significant strain - over the course of the story, he is arrested for a crime he did not commit, and his daughter is critically injured in a standoff with police.
As these examples illustrate, the script has a far darker tone than the first film.
But the script seems conflicted about what it wants to be.
Interspersed with these darker themes, the script is stocked with action (including a helicopter duel, a manhunt through a drug field, and a massive shootout in a half-destroyed mansion).
The script also makes some attempts at replicating the original film’s sense of humour:
Matrix gets a few one-liners, we get one scene of Matrix in a public place acting like a battering ram, and a cross-dressing gag that feels like a soft lead-in to Schwarzenegger’s later role in Junior.
While interesting, on the page Commando II is just not that much fun. Granted, this is just an impression from the page, but the script’s duelling identities make it too po-faced to be fun, and too silly for its critiques to carry any weight.
In terms of tone, Commando II anticipates the Schwarzenegger of the late nineties: The film it reminded me the most of is Eraser, in its focus on high-tech action, personal stakes and its lack of tonal control.
It is a testament to the star’s taste at this period in his career that he did not star in this movie. Instead, Ah-nuld’s 1990 slate would be Total Recall and Kindergarten Cop - two original films that allowed him to play with his persona in different ways (it is worth noting that Schwarzenegger also turned down Predator 2 around this time.
If made, Commando II might have been a hit - but I am doubtful. In 1985, Commando was relatively unique - five years later, these kinds of movies were a dime a dozen, and the genre was undergoing a paradigm shift away from the one-man-army archetypes Schwarzenegger embodied.
In trying to elevate beyond its predecessor, Commando II is a fascinating branch in the Schwarzenegger story. As an unmade film, it is basically a failed experiment - an attempt to test the star’s persona, and to push it into new areas. In this case, the experiment was never actually carried out.
It is an enjoyable read on its own terms, but analysing the script in terms of the context around it, particularly its position in the timeline of Schwarzenegger’s career, makes it more interesting. It is, in its own way, a stepping stone toward the Austrian’s zenith as a leading man. Only two years after this script, Schwarzenegger would headline in Terminator 2 - Judgement Day, a film that succeeded in the objective Commando II failed to: making him a truly human action hero.
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