Arnold Schwarzenegger says there’s a new script for Commando 2. We look back at an unproduced 1989 draft by Steven E de Souza and Frank Darabont. “This was the last time.” “Until the next time.” 1985’s Commando is perhaps the platonic ideal of a movie that’s on when you get home from the pub. Best ... Commando 2 | Exploring the lost 1989 Schwarzenegger sequel
Arnold Schwarzenegger says there’s a new script for Commando 2. We look back at an unproduced 1989 draft by Steven E de Souza and Frank Darabont.
“This was the last time.”
“Until the next time.”
1985’s Commando is perhaps the platonic ideal of a movie that’s on when you get home from the pub. Best enjoyed a few pints deep, the absurd actioner sees Arnold Schwarzenegger’s human wrecking-ball John Matrix wading through goons to rescue his daughter Jenny (Alyssa Milano) from an island of mercenary bastards. He tears through shopping malls and eats Green Berets for breakfast until, finally – and we’re paraphrasing here – all flipping heck breaks loose.
Deliriously entertaining and over-the-top, Commando was also a watershed for Schwarzenegger’s career. Having made his name on The Terminator and Conan The Barbarian, his retired Special Forces Colonel and single dad is more the Arnie we know and sometimes love – a super-quotable, larger-than-life hero.
As screenwriter Steven E de Souza told Empire Online for its 2016 retrospective on the film, the star was attracted to the project because he wasn’t ‘a robot from the future or cavemen from the past’ and he saw it as ‘a role John Wayne could play’.
While Schwarzenegger returned for sequels to Conan and Terminator, a mooted return as John Matrix didn’t pan out. As we reported earlier this week, he’s now floating the possibility of Commando 2 alongside a further Conan sequel and a return to the Predator franchise, but Fox originally wanted a sequel back in the late 1980s.
So, we’ve had a rummage in the internet loft and revisited de Souza’s script for Commando II, Roman-numeraled and dated the 6th February 1989. The cover page also credits Frank Darabont with revisions – this was pre-Shawshank, around the time he was writing films like A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, The Fly II, and 1988’s The Blob.
At the same time, Schwarzenegger was more selective with his projects, playing heroic roles and dipping his size-12s into family-friendly fare. 1990 saw a double-whammy of Total Recall and Kindergarten Cop, two box-office hits that showed off both sides of his movie-star persona.
A year later, Terminator 2: Judgement Day gave him the biggest hit of his career while also making that career shift literal – he’d gone from being the evil killing machine to playing the good robot.
Something would have to give to have squeezed another Matrix movie in anyway, and isn’t it tempting to wonder how different things would be if Schwarzenegger had made Commando II instead of Terminator 2?
Matrix, reloaded
Where the Terminator sequel presented an irresistible reversal, Commando II goes for more of the same – a LOT more of the same. Appreciating that Commando is already a lot of action movie, this 125-page draft ups the stakes, the carnage, and probably the runtime, where the original is done in 90 minutes flat.
The script starts as this article does, with the original’s final exchange between our hero and his mentor, General Kirby (James Olson), where Matrix spits “No chance” at the idea of doing any of this again. Commando II bears that out when Kirby tries an almost-identical helicopter recruitment drive at his home, this time for private contractors McCarren Defense Industries (“Our business is America”) rather than the government. Matrix declines, again.
Without him, Kirby’s unit goes up against drug kingpin Nestor Pedrosa in Costa Rica and gets summarily demolished. Racked by guilt, Matrix invites himself to be McCarren’s new security consultant, training his guards and ramping up security at his compounds. Thanks to him, they have rocket launchers, lethal gas dispensers, and lasers – yes, lasers.
And before he can say “curse your sudden, yet inevitable betrayal”, Matrix discovers McCarren is in cahoots with Pedrosa and wouldn’t you know it, he has to fight his way back into the building he helped make one of the most secure sites on Earth. There’s some confusion about siege action movies here, but de Souza has long since debunked rumours that Commando II was adapted into Die Hard after Arnold passed.
Not only are there no lasers in Die Hard, but there are no bits where John McClane rocket-launches an enemy off Nakatomi Plaza at point-blank range. McClane doesn’t handcuff anyone to a bus as it speeds past, tearing their arm off. He doesn’t disguise himself as a bride at a South American wedding, smoking a stogie under his veil and blowing bad guys away with an M16. These bits of Commando II simply would not fit anywhere else but a sequel to Commando.
Believe it or not, the main difference here is the political context. References to Nancy Reagan proliferate throughout the script, most prominently in an inevitable “Just Say No” gag that kills all the same, but the Iran-Contra arms-trafficking scandal is a major influence on the (threadbare) plot.
Sacrificing the point-and-shoot(-and-punch-and-throw-and-impale-with-a-big-pipe) simplicity of Commando, this sequel makes a few digs at the Reagan administration that we can’t imagine would have much impressed a staunch Republican like Schwarzenegger.
On the other hand, it’s even more tailored to him in that it canonises Matrix as an East German immigrant and an American patriot. His early admiration of “Gimme Some Lovin” by The Spencer Davies Group tees up a later needle drop, but the writers also give Schwarzenegger some heartfelt monologuing about America too. Arguably, we didn’t see Arnie fully explore this angle of his identity on screen until the 2013 High Noon riff The Last Stand.
Read more: Arnold Schwarzenegger and his post-politics movie choices
It doesn’t suddenly get any more serious, mind. Aside from the Not In Die Hard highlights mentioned above, Commando II also has Matrix demolishing nightclub bouncers in a rehash of the first film’s mall security battle-royale, using a corrupt judge as a battering ram to escape a criminal arraignment, and dispatching a helicopter pilot in flight and then figure out how to fly a helicopter.
The Commando screenplay structure rule, for whoever’s working on Commando 2 right now, is that Matrix does something outrageous every two pages or so.
Rather than keep the action contained to McCarren’s complex, the script balloons out to a further action-packed act in South America. There’s no equivalent to Vernon Wells’ deranged homoerotic foil Bennett in the original, and by the end of the sequel script, it reads like a case of too many antagonists and too many pages over which to splatter them.
Its most bizarre twist is worthy of Dickens – General Kirby, who did NOT die, is behind everything. That includes giving Matrix, unstoppable patriotic killing machine, a whiff of in his arms-and-drugs-trafficking conspiracy. “If Ollie North had any brains or balls, he’d have done the same thing”, Kirby raves of his own inscrutable plot.
You’d have to ask de Souza and Darabont who did what, but the beat we’d like to know more about comes a while before the overstuffed climax. During a pivotal scene, Jenny Matrix takes a bullet from an incompetent cop who splutters “I thought I saw a gun”. A few scenes later, her dad escapes police custody and visits her in the hospital.
As she lays in critical condition, we get the best and most preposterous monologue Schwarzenegger never got to utter.
“We thought this would be a good place to raise a child… your mother and I,” he tells Jenny. “So we came to this country. […] You are the best and gentlest part of me. If you die, I will have no gentleness left… and then God help them. God help them all.”
Before he goes off to unleash flipping heck again, the scene ends with him leaning over her, giving her a gentle kiss, and saying…
“I’ll be back.”
No chance?
We’ve written on the site before about the evolution of “I’ll be back” as Arnie’s catchphrase, but even on the page, there’s something stirring about this particular drop. Altogether, it reads like a precursor to Liam Neeson’s badass dad speeches in Taken and its ilk.
Frankly, it’s about the only thing this has to offer Schwarzenegger that he didn’t already cover as Matrix. Commando plays like the ultimate excessive 80s action movie, but Commando II didn’t fit with where Schwarzenegger was headed by 1989, so it’s little surprise he passed on the script when it came along. It’s hardly in the upper-tier of the “what ifs” among his unmade 1990s projects, like Paul Verhoeven’s Crusade or Oliver Stone’s Planet Of The Apes reboot.
As it stands, the biggest continuation of Commando is the G.I. Joe-a-like action figure line from Diamond Toymakers. Released a year after the movie, the toys make Matrix the leader of C-Team, an elite unit dedicated to battling the forces of F.E.A.R. Characters like Spex, Blaster, Chopper, Psycho, and Lead-Head never troubled the sequel script, but the toys also came with a kid-friendly comic-strip retelling of the first movie (pictured above).
Otherwise, Fox announced a Commando remake in 2010, with David Ayer attached to write and direct. Ayer had another run at that draft last year, and sources indicate that 20th Century Studios will now be looking to adapt that script into a reboot/legacyquel with a role for Arnie. And as another, much likelier Schwarzenegger legacyquel might have it, that story will also be told.
In the meantime, even if he once again says “No chance” to Commando II, we’ll always have the original, and the greatest artefact of its cult popularity – the musical retelling of the plot by musical comedians Jon and Al Kaplan.
All together now: “Jenny and meeee…”
