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Commando Lets Off Some Steam
September 12, 2007

Let’s face it; Mark E. Lester’s 1985 Commando is good, but not great. Despite it’s superlative production credits—a screenplay by Steven E. de Souza, a pulsating score by James Horner and a game cast that includes Rae Dawn Chong, Dan Hedaya, David Patrick Kelly, Bill Duke, a pre-tattoo Alyssa Milano and Vernon Wells—it’s best acknowledged as a template for Eighties overkill action flicks. And, more notably, as a carefully constructed vehicle tailored around it’s star, Arnold Schwarzenegger. So, in the moments between the when the shootings, explosions, dismemberments, impalements and axes to the groin (ouch!), there’s a good deal of focusing on feats of superhuman strength as can only be performed by Ah-nold (i.e. carrying a downed tree up a mountain, hoisting a car off its rear wheels, etc.).

 

All of this is touched upon in the supplemental sections of Fox’s about-to-be-released Commando: Director’s Cut, which includes a Lester commentary, a pair of featurettes, an impressive photo gallery

and, best of all, a handful of deleted scenes. Amongst said sequences is a bit wherein Arnold experiments with a few different bits of dialogue following his climactic skewering of a bad guy named Bennett with a pipe up against a pressurized furnace, resulting in a whoosh of steaming blowing through the pipe and out of his body. Giving Arnold a wise-ass quip (following a particularly violent death) was a necessity—just look what it had done for him a coupla years earlier in The Terminator. Or don’t you remember “I’ll be back.”

 

The line in the theatrical version is “Let off some steam, Bennett.” Here, we get to see Arnold trying out some others, including “I hate small talk,” “I think it was too much pressure for you Bennett” and “Can’t take the pressure, Bennett?” Oh well, “Let off some steam” didn’t remain in the heads of moviegoers very long, and Arnold continued to regularly return to “I’ll be back,” which he actually says in Commando at one early point in Commando. So much for that dry cleaning/steam pressing endorsement deal that Arnold’s camp was undoubtedly hoping for!  

Posted by Laurence Lerman on September 12, 2007 | Comments (0)