Commando Commando Full Movie

[Eboni Kleifgen]

Schwarzeneggers brawn is used for slapstick effect throughout. He's the Terminator as single dad. Abetted by Cindy, he charges through Southern California with an improbable blend of lethal grace and thunder-footed clumsiness. At times his whole performance seems modeled on the scene in "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" where Jonathan Winters destroys a gas station with his bare hands. Matrix rips through a partition in the cargo hold of a plane, kicks and punches enemies so hard that they crash through walls, snaps a man's neck with his bare hands as if it were a shingle, and rips a seat out of Cindy's convertible for no discernible reason (it can't be to hide from Sully; in long shots of the vehicle, Matrix's head is sticking up right next to Cindy's, like a dog enjoying the feel of highway wind in his mouth). He just crashes through the world, punching and kicking and shooting and incinerating everything and everyone that stands in his way, until he finally javelins a pipe through Bennett and wraps his redwood arms around his daughter again and they fly away with Cindy.

Are we supposed to think that Matrix, Jenny and Cindy form a makeshift nuclear family in the end? It's hard to say, because this is a rare '80s action flick that doesn't twist the script's only significant male-female relationship (unless you count a couple surprised mid-coitus when soldiers crash through their motel room wall) into a love story. But at the same time, "Commando" treats the leads' very real chemistry as a comic resource that's ultimately as important as the film's explosions and prosthetic flourishes (like that buzz saw flattop that the hero gives a goon in the toolshed scene). That Matrix and Cindy's relationship is so instantly comfortable adds to its humor. They get along as if they've known each other for years. She busts his chops and freaks out sometimes but always comes through in a pinch (she even figures out how to fire a rocket launcher by reading the instructions), and Matrix never loses his cool with her. He treats Cindy as if she's the latest addition to his unit, somebody who's green but will get the hang of things eventually.

There's an arc here; who'd have thunk it? Before Matrix met Cindy, she was a flight attendant who couldn't get a date, now she's helping a commando rescue his daughter by flying a hijacked seaplane to an island stronghold. One of the many fun ways to think about this film after-the-fact is to envision it a chaste romantic comedy titled "When Matrix Met Cindy," about the most exciting twelve hours in a woman's life. Even if the two don't end up married after the final credits fade, I bet they keep in touch. Maybe Cindy attends Jenny's high school graduation and gives her a card with a drawing of a seaplane on it.

There is an enormous difference between starting a company and running one. Thinking up great ideas, which requires mainly intelligence and knowledge, is much easier than building an organization, which also requires measures of tenacity, discipline, and understanding. Part of the reason that nineteen out of twenty high-tech start-ups end in failure must be the difficulty of making this critical transition from a bunch of guys in a rented office to a larger bunch of guys in a rented office with customers to serve. Customers? What are those?

Think of the growth of a company as a military operation, which isn't such a stretch, given that both enterprises involve strategy, tactics, supply lines, communication, alliances, and manpower.

Whether invading countries or markets, the first wave of troops to see battle are the commandos. Woz and Jobs were the commandos of the Apple II. Don Estridge and his twelve disciples were the commandos of the IBM PC. Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston were the commandos of VisiCalc. Mitch Kapor and Jonathan Sachs were the commandos of Lotus 1-2-3. Commandos parachute behind enemy lines or quietly crawl ashore at night. A start-up's biggest advantage is speed, and speed is what commandos live for. They work hard, fast, and cheap, though often with a low level of professionalism, which is okay, too, because professionalism is expensive. Their job is to do lots of damage with surprise and teamwork, establishing a beachhead before the enemy is even aware that they exist. Ideally, they do this by building the prototype of a product that is so creative, so exactly correct for its purpose that by its very existence it leads to the destruction of other products. They make creativity a destructive act.

For many products, and even for entire families of products, the commandos are the only forces that are allowed to be creative. Only they get to push the state of the art, providing creative solutions to customer needs. They have contact with potential customers, view the development process as an adventure, and work on the total product. But what they build, while it may look like a product and work like a product, usually isn't a product because it still has bugs and major failings that are beneath the notice of commando types. Or maybe it works fine but can't be produced profitably without extensive redesign. Commandos are useless for this type of work. They get bored.

When 3Com Corp. was developing the first circuit card that would allow personal computers to communicate over Ethernet computer networks, the lead commando was Ron Crane, a brilliant, if erratic, engineer. The very future of 3Com depended on his finishing the Ethernet card on time, since the company was rapidly going broke and additional venture funding was tied to successful completion of the card. No Ethernet card, no money; no money, no company. In the middle of this high-pressure assignment, Crane just stopped working on the Ethernet card, leaving it unfinished on his workbench, and compulsively turned to finding a way to measure the sound reflectivity of his office ceiling tiles. That's the way it is sometimes when commandos get bored. Nobody else was prepared to take over Crane's job, so all his co-workers at 3Com could think to do in this moment of crisis was to wait for the end of his research, hoping that it would go well.

The happy ending here is that Crane eventually established 3Com's ceiling tile acoustic reflectivity standard, regained his Ethernet bearings, and delivered the breakthrough product, allowing 3Com to achieve its destiny as a $900 million company.

Grouping offshore as the commandos do their work is the second wave of soldiers, the infantry. These are the people who hit the beach en masse and slog out the early victory, building on the start given them by the commandos. The second-wave troops take the prototype, test it, refine it, make it manufacturable, write the manuals, market it, and ideally produce a profit. Because there are so many more of these soldiers and their duties are so varied, they require an infrastructure of rules and procedures for getting things done-all the stuff that commandos hate. For just this reason, soldiers of the second wave, while they can work with the first wave, generally don't trust them, though the commandos don't even notice this fact, since by this time they are bored and already looking for the door.

The second wave is hardest to manage because they require a structure in which to work. While the commandos make success possible, it's the infantry that makes success happen. They know their niche and expend the vast amounts of resources it takes to maintain position, or to reposition a product if the commandos made too many mistakes. While the commandos come up with creative ways to hurt the enemy, giving the start-up its purpose and early direction, the infantry actually kill the enemy or drive it away, occupying the battlefield and establishing a successful market presence for the start-up and its product.

What happens then is that the commandos and the infantry head off in the direction of Berlin or Baghdad, advancing into new territories, performing their same jobs again and again, though each time in a slightly different way. But there is still a need for a military presence in the territory they leave behind, which they have liberated. These third-wave troops hate change. They aren't troops at all but police. They want to fuel growth not by planning more invasions and landing on more beaches but by adding people and building economies and empires of scale. AT&T, IBM, and practically all other big, old, successful industrial companies are examples of third-wave enterprises. They can't even remember their first- and second-wave founders.

Engineers in these established companies work on just part of a product, view their work as a job rather than an adventure, and usually have no customer contact. They also have no expectation of getting rich, and for good reason, because as companies grow, and especially after they go public, stock becomes a less effective employee motivator. They get fewer shares at a higher price, with less appreciation potential. Of course, there is also less risk, and to third-wave troops, this safety makes the lower reward worthwhile.

It's in the transitions between these waves of troops that peril lies for computer start-ups. The company founder and charismatic leader of the Invasion is usually a commando, which means that he or she thrills to the idea of parachuting in and slashing throats but can't imagine running a mature organization that deals with the problems of customers or even with the problems of its own growing base of employees. Mitch Kapor of Lotus Development was an example of a commando/nice guy who didn't like to fire people or make unpopular decisions, and so eventually tired of being a chief executive, leaving at the height of its success the company he founded.

First-wave types have trouble, too, accepting the drudgery that comes with being the boss of a high-tech start-up. Richard Leeds worked at Advanced Micro Devices and then Microsoft before starting his own small software company near Seattle. One day a programmer came to report that the toilet was plugged in the men's room. "Tell the office manager," Leeds said. "It's her job to handle things like that."

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