The Commando (2022)

I saw this on Tubi and wanted to make it happen strictly to get more Michael Jai White on the site, and the fact that it had some other favorites like Mickey Rourke and Jeff Fahey helped. In addition to us, the New York Times, The Guardian, and Variety have covered this too.

The Commando has White as a DEA agent suffering from PTSD after accidentally shooting and killing a wife and her two young daughters during a raid of a drug compound. At the same time, Mickey Rourke is getting out of prison, and he wants the $3 million he stashed in his parents' old house. Whose house is that now? You guessed it, White's. Just happens that one of his daughters has found some of the money, so she uses some of that to send her parents on weekend away, with the idea in mind that with her parents away, she can have a party. Oh, she'll have a party all right, and her poor older sister will have more to worry about than whether or not she'll get to sleep with all the noise, as these violent baddies break in looking for their cash. Will White make it back in time to save them?

Save who? The daughters? From death maybe, but the unfortunate older one still gets beaten and raped, and while most of it happens off-screen, that it happens at all is enough. The Guardian wasn't a fan of it either, but mistook the older daughter for the younger daughter who threw the party, so it wasn't even a twisted penance for throwing a party as they said, it's a twisted penance for being a stick in the mud about the party? And speaking of the party, all the guys and some of the girls the younger daughter invites over get murdered too. In a horror movie, teens getting killed is harsh, but we can handle it. When it's sadistic baddies in a home invasion, it's darker, and was handled here pretty callously, as if director Asif Akbar didn't realize he was murdering kids or something. The Michael Jai White we get is solid, and I did like the twist of him dealing with PTSD from a DEA mission instead of a combat tour, but even that didn't make a lot of sense, considering he was slitting guys' throats and shooting first and asking questions later all over the place. As the writer of the Variety review said, it felt more like a writer's crutch. Either way, when he gets home and takes out all of Rourke's baddies, it was pretty sweet, it was just a shame we didn't get more of it sooner. Rourke himself was great, even in a limited capacity, as was Jeff Fahey, in an even more limited capacity. I think if this had a cleaner, less dark identity, it would've worked better. The rape and murder of kids is not something to casually toss around in a film, especially not a 90-minute DTV actioner that's more meant to be a fun time waster than anything.

But we did achieve our one goal, right? We got more White up, with this being his 25th film now. Interestingly enough, that puts him only two behind Scott Adkins. Depending on how the new releases fall, if I'm leaning more on the back catalogs White could catch him and beat him to the 30 Club. The thing you can see when watching a film like this is how much he should be getting better parts in better films. Forget playing a DEA agent who slits low-level drug cartel members' throats, he's showed us over and over how much better he is than that. I think that's why he's gotten into more directing. An Outlaw Johnny Black isn't going to come to him, he needs to make it himself, and what's great is when he does, we get something fantastic. He does his best to make this fantastic too, which I appreciate. He saw something in the character he liked and went for it--for one take, and then they moved on to the next scene, as this did feel like a bit of a rush job.

This is now five for Mickey Rourke, and while we can joke that you get what you pay for, because he's not in many scenes, he also turns in a pretty solid performance in the limited role he has, and I think the fact that he's in this at all is the reason this is getting reviewed in major publications and not just sites like mine. One thing I didn't realize about him, I thought he was born in the late 50s/early 60s, but he was born in 1952, meaning he was almost 70 when this was made. I don't think he was playing someone 70 though, I think based off of John Enos III, who was playing a biker that was a longtime friend of Rourke's, that would make him ten years younger, but then I think both of them were supposed to have been born in the late 60s, which would mean Rourke was playing someone a good 15 years younger. I think you could also do the same thing with Michael Jai White, who was born in '67, but paired with Brendan Fehr in this, who was born in '77, probably say that White's character was ten years younger too. To be honest, I would've liked Rourke's character more if he was playing his age. Say he was in prison even longer, maybe he has to adapt more to life on the outside. The problem was, with the limited time they had him, younger and less time in jail was the way they had to play it.

This is the second film we've done that was directed by Asif Akbar, the other being the Gary Daniels film Astro. This one was definitely more brutal than that one, but it also felt a bit like an Amir Shervan film in that the brutality felt more like it was trying to mimic the American action genre. Akbar said in his bio that he grew up in the States, unlike Shervan who moved here during the Iranian Revolution, which I think would explain why it's not as off as the Shervan films were, but the seeds of it are still there. Tonally, murdering teens, beating and raping a young woman, or even DEA agents slitting the cartel grunts' throats puts the movie in a different place from teens just being held hostage and menaced, the threat of the young woman being raped but it never happens, and the cartel grunts being incapacitated with a rear-naked choke by the DEA agents. Where does that confused tone come in though? Is it a misunderstanding of what makes Commando--not The Commando--with Schwarzenegger work despite the high body count? What is the difference between Arnold raiding the tool shed and murdering baddies versus DEA agents slitting guys' throats? I don't know how to explain it fully, but tonally that difference exists, and this film has the Shervan--or even Godfrey Ho--feel of our culture being reflected back at us, even if it was to a much smaller degree.

Finally, this film asks the age-old question: what do you do when you find a lot of money? The closest situation I've ever been in to that, was when I was out with some friends and their kids, and I was washing my hands after going to the bathroom, when one of the friends' kids came out of a stall with a wallet stuffed with cash and asked me what to do with it. This was a TGIFridays, so we took it to the host, and the person whose wallet it was came for it after. We got barely a thank you from the guy, forget any of the cash as a reward, but I felt better knowing we did the right thing regardless. Now, if I found millions of dollars under a floorboard where I was living, I'd probably call the cops in that situation too, and they'd probably just confiscate it and use it for their police funds, but with all the action films I've seen, I'd also wonder if they may be in on it, like Fahey was here, and instead of letting me just turn it over, would kill me for it too. I don't have the martial arts skills of say a Don "The Dragon" Wilson, who could handle the Bloodfist-ian wherewithal required to escape a situation like that, and then live on the run for however long it took to expose the conspiracy at the heart of why this cop tried to kill me. All that to say, I guess the hope is I'm never unfortunate enough to find a pile of cash anywhere, especially not in the floorboards of a place I'm living in.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of my writing, you can get this free on Tubi here in the States. I think this is really for Michael Jai White completists, or if you have a site like mine and you want to get more than 30 films of his reviewed. Otherwise, you could probably skip it. You've seen this one before, and while it tries to cover new territory with the PTSD angle, really what distinguishes it is the tonal confusion with all the brutality.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12689248

And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.

Astro (2018)

This is one that's been on the shelf for a long time. Back in 2020 when I did my Gary Daniels Letterboxd list as part of my 1000th post celebration, I watched this along with a bunch of others of his that I hadn't seen in order to inform my decisions, but unlike those others which I had since reviewed, this one lingered to the point where I needed to rewatch it, and when a film hits the dreaded rewatch list it can take that much longer to get it done. At least we're finally doing it now.

Astro is about a billionaire (Marshal Hilton) whose company finds an alien, and when they sequence its DNA, discover it's related to a human who used to serve in the military with him, the one and only Gary Daniels. Now he needs to get Gary to join him, but unlike the real world where people seem to love billionaires, at least in movies people are still suspicious of them, and Daniels is right to be, because this man has ulterior motives. He sends a goon squad to take Daniels and his daughter out, and when that doesn't work, Daniels infiltrates the company compound to the bottom of things. Just wait till he meets the alien!

This is pretty unremarkable, which was probably a big reason why I didn't review it sooner. The thing is, it wasn't like it was bad, just unremarkable. It's definitely made on the cheap, and it's definitely made quickly, which isn't the worst thing, but it has a complicated plot with a lot of backstory and moving parts, and that results in a lot of exposition and padding. The film did a good job in replacing that exposition with actual scenes instead of explanations through dialog, but the problem was there was a lot there to catch us up on, and a lot of it had to do with the billionaire guy instead of Gary Daniels, even though Daniels was our star. The film also sets up for a sequel that it doesn't look like is happening, and that leaves us with this open ending that doesn't resolve anything. I think at least if we had had a more definitive ending, the other flaws would've been forgiven, but we didn't, so ultimately I was left with a lot of blah, which, as I said above, isn't exactly bad, but it isn't good either.

This is now 59 films for Daniels at the DTVC, second only to Dolph's 70. I looked at his IMDb bio between 2015 and now, and there aren't a lot of projects, just 12 feature films--compared to Dolph's 25+--and of that, only 10 really fit what we're doing on the site. What that tells me is Daniels is being more selective in what he chooses, evidenced too by the fact that only Zero Tolerance and Dancin' It's On are smaller parts. With that in mind, I have to assume that Astro looked better on paper than it was in execution. While we here at the DTVC have always leaned more toward Mitch at the Video Vacuum's tenet of quantity of quality, if Daniels is going in the other direction, I can appreciate it. But this film shows where that quality over quantity can split both ways, because we get a more engaged, fuller Daniels performance here, but is this better than three smaller parts in some Jesse V. Johnson or Daniel Zirilli actioners? It's an interesting question, both for him as an actor, and us as fans, which would we rather have too?

The writer, director, and producer of this film was Asif Akbar, and while this is the first time we've done one of his films on the site, we have seen some of the films he's produced on the podcast, including Phoenix (speaking of Daniel Zirilli) and The Weapon. As a director and producer, he's working with some bigger names that are familiar to fans of the site, like Michael Jai White, Mickey Rourke, and Art Camacho, but in looking at his bio, this was the first film he did with a lot of recognizable names in it. I think it's always cool to see where people start out in the business, and how they grow and move up. As much as this film may have its shortcomings, I do respect that for Akbar it was just another step in the journey. It'll be interesting to see what we get next from him, but in anticipation of more of his films coming to the site in the future, I've given him a tag.

I could get into the fact that we have more from Dominique Swain, or that this is 12 films for Louis Mandylor and 17 for Michael Pare, but there isn't much to say about their roles other than they were there, and they did well enough. So why then do I have a screen of Gianni Capaldi? Well, one, he finally got his own tag with this being his fifth film on the site; and two, one of those previous four was one of the most egregious bait-and-switches in the history of the site, the Dolph film Ambushed. That film came out in 2013, and it feels like the DTV world has only become more cynical since then, especially with the explosion of streaming. For distributors it's less about putting out good content, and more about what it will take to get us to stream something. EFO created the blue print, and so many others in the business are jumping onboard. If I can say one thing about this film, it at least feels like an earnest attempt, and I'll take that all day over a film like Ambushed that sold us on one thing, and gave us something entirely different.

Finally, as we do with all members of the 50 Club, Daniels is getting a second paragraph. Where we go next with him is anyone's guess. The Gardener would be a good pick for number 60, the problem is it's only available to rent on Amazon. How is that one not on Tubi yet? From there he has his Christian films, The Mark: Redemption and Encounter: Paradise Lost, which, we have done the first Mark movie, so it's not totally outside the realm of possibility, but do I want to do a Christian film for his entry into the 60 Club? That might mean that he sits on 59 for a while, which, from an actor standpoint, Cynthia Rothrock is 17 behind him with 42 films, so it's not like he'll be passed anytime soon, but with Dolph having at least one film coming out this year, but potentially two, he's going to keep expanding his all-time lead with the most ever. Back to that quantity over quality debate.

And with that, let's wrap this up. This has been on Tubi since I first watched it back in 2020, and I have a hunch if someone sees this review ten years from now it will still be on Tubi. For me it's really about watching and reviewing another Gary Daniels flick, and if you're a fan of him, this is worth it from that standpoint.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6156656

And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.