User Reviews

"They're in a rage for justice!" American Commandos is an interesting hybrid of two favorite B-action genres: the revenge movie and the back-to-Vietnam tale (with a bit of the old "ragtag team" thrown in for good measure).

Chris Mitchum plays Dean Mitchell (I know, quite a stretch), the one gas station attendant you don't wanna mess with. He's a taciturn Vietnam vet who doesn't say very much. When some stupid baddies DO decide to mess with him, they end up in a world of hurt. They try robbing his beloved gas station, and then they go after his family. Big mistake. Chandler, Speck and Buck (the evildoers' names) live to regret the day they went after him. So ends the Death Wish (1974) section of the film.

When "The Man" also known as Brady (Ken Metcalfe) who works for the government, gets wise to Mitchell's technically-unlawful revenge methods, he leverages that against him so that he can send Mitchell to the "Golden Triangle" to destroy a drug operation there. He literally asks them to "blow it up". Radical! ("You don't have a license to kill anymore" Brady tells Mitchell. Mitchell disagrees.) So he teams up with his old buddies Kelly (Law), Brutus (Robert Marius), Somsak (Guerrero of the Richard Norton classics Kick Fighter (1987) and Cross Fire (1988)) and Creeper (Williams). They have an awesome tank, much like the one in Bulletproof (1988) (But in this movie no one gets called a "Butthorn" - make of that what you will) that has missile launchers, hidden guns, cool armor and a space for a motorbike to bust out! Will this team survive not just the countless amounts of people shooting at them, but all the twists and turns in the plot as well? We love Chris Mitchum. He closely resembles his father and also shares his trait of being a man of few words. It's a good antidote to the overly-verbose post-Tarantino movies of today. The character of Creeper dresses in sleeveless beer shirts (Olympia and Budweiser) or no shirt at all. He also has some cool slang (Why you payin' cool green for a snap job?"). Speaking of cool clothes, John Philip Law - another one we always love seeing - has an extremely awesome T-shirt that simply says "AMERICA RULES!" I guess that's for when he goes to foreign countries so the baddies know who to shoot at.

So while the movie is an entertaining time, with the revenge movie section, the Golden Triangle section where they shoot millions of thugs and attempt to dismantle the heroin operation (all this when they're not getting numerous "massages" at the local whorehouse run by one of the heroes), there is one scene in particular that stands out - the one that is REPEATED! Yes, probably by accident, about an hour into the movie we see the same scene twice. Literally. This editing-room mistake makes for some laughs and extends the running time quite unnecessarily. It's really weird.

So if you want some kind of cross between Death Wish and Codename: Wildgeese (1984) starring some familiar faces, you'll surely like American Commandos.

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It's like the guy above me said, the movie is full of plot holes and goes from Death Wish to ...some other movie, out of nowhere. But I enjoyed the hell out of it.

One thing I thought was a little bit hypocritical - he's on a mission to put a stop to drug crime, but it's perfectly fine for his buddy to own a whorehouse, and he even sleeps with the prostitutes there. This after his wife and son just died too....

Also there are two scenes that are supposed to take place at completely different times, where Mitchell tries to get information from Creeper. It's very obvious they were filmed at the exact same time, and the only difference apart from dialog is that Creeper's Olympia beer shirt is replaced with a Budweiser beer shirt. For some reason this was funny to me.

Still 1.6/10? That's a little harsh if you ask me.

American Commandos is another trashy film made by Robert Mitchum's non-famous son, Christopher. Mitchum plays a guy whose wife is raped and son killed by criminal goons. His wife's trauma is too much for her to bear and she takes her life soon afterwards, leaving him bereft and gunning for revenge.

His vengeance takes him to the infamous Golden Triangle where he joins forces with fellow macho man John Phillip Law to take the fight to the drug lords themselves. What follows is your typical Filipino-made action movie, chock-full of shootings and explosions and not much in the way of sense.

There isn't much in the way of gore here but there's plenty of sleazy nudity from unknown actresses for exploitation purposes. Mitchum and Law barely break a sweat as the bullets fly and there's a general lack of effort and coherence all round. It's pretty much the norm for Filipino cinema.

Apart from the bad acting of Christopher Mitchum, I truly rooted for his Vietnam vet character to painfully knock off the bad guys who killed his son out of revenge while raping his wife, after which she killed herself. The rapist is seen on top of her with a pleasurable look of ecstasy on his face (a look repeated with other rapes included in the film), and this image disgusted me even though the rapist would get killed during or right after the act. The rape, murder and suicide sets Mitchum up not only for revenge but the main plot where he goes back to Vietnam on a battle against the drug cartels which involves vets who stayed behind to become involved in a life of crime rather than return home to an honest life.

Laughably bad teeth (every other one pulled to give a monstrous look) on one of the main villains gave me a good giggle, but the exploitation of rape was just repulsive. A sweet flashback to Mitchum recalling how he met his Vietnam native wife shows a very loving marriage, the kind of relationship where when one of the people dies, the other becomes the walking dead like Mitchum does. This made me interested in those small elements of the film that occur infrequently, indicating that the writer did try to create something meaningful. But gratuitous sex and violence just cheapens this, and the determination for Mitchum to eradicate the men who rapes his wife as well as the drug cartel men raping women in Vietnam yet be so perverse in how the rapes are filmed indicated major hypocrisy over those themes.