Gay reading of the film

A user on thedigitalfix.com posted this years ago. The original seems to be gone but I thought it was so well written I’d preserve it. Enjoy:

Enormously enjoyable though Commando is on the surface, what's most entertaining about it in retrospect is its hilariously blatant gay subtext, which I presume was intentional (whether or not Arnie was in on the joke). Consider: all the considerable acreage of bare flesh on display is not only male (Arnie's cleavage gets much more exposure than Rae Dawn Chong's!), but mostly glistening with sweat, veins throbbing beneath the surface, and although there's a token female lead, Matrix shows no romantic or sexual interest towards her whatsoever - even in the final shot, when she beams at him, he remains stolidly impassive.

Consider further: the film's structure is strongly reminiscent of a porno movie, in which Matrix has a series of one-on-one encounters with increasingly beefy men, from the small, slight, faintly effeminate Sully (David Patrick Kelly) to the rather more chunky (Bill Duke, looking for all the world like a Robert Mapplethorpe model), culminating in the full-on grappling session with Bennett (Vernon Wells), whose personality traits can be summed up in two words: "leather" and "moustache" (or possibly "Freddie" and "Mercury") - all interspersed with shots of Matrix striding across the lawn, aggressively phallic weapon in hand, spraying bullets and oddly testicular grenades everywhere with orgasmic abandon (and as for that last shot of Bennett... I won't spoil it, but you won't forget it in a hurry!). You want more proof? Just listen to his very first line - in which he reveals he reads magazine articles about Boy George! And what exactly does he mean when he claims "I eat Green Berets for breakfast"?

There is of course the question of his daughter, but I think it's pretty clear that she was adopted - not only is there no physical resemblance whatsoever, but if he had a say in her christening, why did he pick a name he has such obvious difficulty pronouncing? ("Chenny") There's also no mention of her mother, so the most reasonable explanation is that Jenny is the sole survivor of one of Matrix's earlier massacres, and that he's protecting her out of a sense of profound guilt.