There are a lot of endless debates out there over what’s better than what, who’s better than who, and so on and so forth until the cows come home and the sun sets in the west as we’re drinking Mai Tai’s and looking forward to another day and another round of endless bantering. But one thing that you might not hear all the time is this: which Arnold Schwarzenegger movie was best, Commando, or Predator? There are a lot of people out there such as Gabriel D. of Medium that will gush over such an answer and easily rise to the challenge with a cry of Commando/Predator….which might make a lot of people say ‘huh? which one?’. Therein lies the rub. It’s not really about which movie was better, depending on who you talk to, but there are a lot of factors leading up to whether a person will like one or the other better since to be fair, both of the movies featured Arnold in his prime since he was stacked back in the day and had no trouble showing off all that muscle and what it could do with a heaping helping of movie magic and the continuous suspension of belief. The former governator has been entertaining us all for a long time now and during his best days he was doing so in a fashion that could only be described as either hilarious or raw and as rough as it could get. But let’s delve into the reasons why Commando might edge out Predator, shall we?
To start off, John Matrix is on his own for the most part, though he does have some help at one point or another, but not the kind of help one would expect for a guy taking on a bunch of mercenaries and the massive number of soldiers he ends up killing as he goes one-man army on everyone. Of course out of his entire team, who have been killed or turned on him as Bennett did, he’s the only one that could possibly pull this off because it’s ARNOLD for crying out loud, he’s the guy that can take out an army on his own and take down hardened, seasoned mercenaries with ease. The downfall of this is that it does become kind of hilarious when he’s dangling a guy off of a cliff by one leg and showing no signs of struggling or fatigue after all he’s been through at that point. Plus, the line “I eat Green Berets for breakfast”…..how in the world can you not find that somehow amusing? Of course a little while later he uppercuts the guy so hard that Bill Duke goes flying back onto a table leg, impaling himself and dying shortly after. This was pretty standard fare for the 80s though, so a lot of us just went with it.
Predator is just as entertaining but it definitely doesn’t show of Arnold’s softer side since John Matrix is all about getting his daughter back, whereas Dutch in Predator is all about getting his team out of the jungle after a botched operation that he had no idea about in the first place. Comparing the two is kind of difficult since in Commando we see a guy going after his daughter and slaughtering mercenaries and soldiers left and right with utter impunity, while in Predator, Arnold and his men are slowly being picked off by a creature that looks like a mutated crab that grew arms and legs and has an affinity for hunting humans and ripping their skulls from their bodies like he’s some intergalactic Sub-Zero. If you don’t get that reference then I’m sorry but not sorry, you definitely don’t get pop culture. Calling Commando a better movie than Predator is like saying that The Conjuring was more terrifying than Alien, it’s an argument that just doesn’t stack up. But for those that need a definitive answer you can at least look at it this way, John Matrix does have a slight edge over Dutch since the famous line “Get to the choppah!” is basically Arnold-ese for “Run away!”, something that we don’t often hear in an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, especially not back in the day when he looked tough enough to chew on nails and spit them back out while building a house with his own two hands. Yep, that’s the vision that a lot of people had of Arnold back in the day. But hearing him say “run” just wasn’t expected, even when facing down something that could turn invisible, blow a two-foot hole through your body with a laser cannon, and could rip your spine and skull from your body with ease.
So really, if Commando is better it’s because John Matrix is the most impressive guy in the movie, whereas Dutch kind of gets overshadowed by his otherworldly opponent without much effort.
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