![]() ![]() The eerily prescient Running Man gets a lot of stuff right about its eventual future (right down to Mick Fleetwood's exact look in 2017), despite a host of necessary '80s-futurist aesthetic trappings. In Schwarzenegger's memoir, Total Recall, he reveals that director Andrew Davis was originally hired to direct this project, from a script by Steven de Souza (writer of Commando and Die Hard). Davis was fired after two weeks, a decision Schwarzenegger bemoaned in retrospect. He was replaced by Paul Michael Glaser, a working TV director at the time. When he is recaptured, he is placed in the US's top survivalist reality/game show, The Running Man, where convicts try to escape captors for the prize of an expunged record. That, too, was not far off the reality of 2017. After police chopper pilot Ben Richards (Arnold Schwarzenegger) gets framed for killing folks in a food riot, he ultimately escapes his labor camp sentence and takes composer Amber Méndez (María Conchita Alonso) hostage while trying to flee California. In 2017 (30 years into the future of the movie's release), the US has devolved into a police state after an economic collapse. It's just a matter of time until we go full Running Man out there, folks. Just recently, several South Dakota teachers were forced to fight each other for cash to finance their classrooms during a break in a hockey game, broadcast far and wide. The first cinematic adaptation of Stephen King's dystopic novel, The Running Man, might boast cheesy production design and over-the-top performances, but it's also ominously on-point, the tale of a lower-class family being forced to duke it out for everyone else's televised entertainment. This is not nearly the level of a classically "good" Arnie flick, along the lines of Predator or the first two Terminator films. If you engage in the experience with your brain turned off, you should thoroughly enjoy yourself. Let's not spoil what happens here - suffice it to say that Arnie typically survives his non- Terminator roles.Ĭommando is incredibly violent and delightfully goofy, but it also is quite aware of how goofy it is. With the help of a pretty flight attendant, Cindy (Rae Dawn Chong), John works his way back to Arius's sprawling estate for an epic confrontation. John, who apparently subsists on a diet of Green Berets, will obviously be no one's pawn, and is soon going full John Rambo (the character John Matrix was clearly modeled upon) against Bennett and Arius, opting out of his assassination task and instead systematically taking down their goons. One-man wrecking crew John Matrix (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a former United States Special Forces colonel raising his loving preteen daughter, Jenny (Alyssa Milano), all on his own in an idyllic mountainside home. When Jenny is abducted by a crew of mercenaries led by John's former work colleague, Captain Bennett (Vernon Wells), John goes on the warpath. Upon confronting Bennett, John is supposedly coerced into carrying out a political assassination on behalf of Bennett's superior, ex-South American dictator President Arius (Dan Hedaya). But it's their loss!Ĭommando is the most 1985 movie to ever 1985. Jack and Wang Chi, along with Wang's buddy Eddie (Donald Li), circumstantial tagalongs Gracie (Kim Cattrall) and Margo, and magician Egg Shen (Victor Wong), find themselves battling lightning-summoning sorcerers and navigating through brothels, caverns, and Lo Pan's labyrinthine headquarters in a strange, funny, rollicking adventure. Why the movie didn't land with 1986 audiences is hard to gauge now. It is Wang Chi who leads Jack through their local Chinatown Wang Chi is the brains and the proactive character. It is Wang Chi's fiancee, Miao Yin (Suzee Pai), who sets the plot in motion when she gets abducted by the goons of psychotic, ancient sorcerer David Lo Pan (James Hong). Jack Burton (Kurt Russell), the star of the show, is the muscle - the dumb, wisecracking associate of the narrative's true hero, Wang Chi (Dennis Dun). He thinks he’s the hero of the story, but he’s not. Jack is a character who doesn’t know he’s a sidekick. Weinstein, as he explained years later in an Uproxx interview: The flick grossed just $11.1 million worldwide, less than half of its reported budget.Ĭarpenter took a unique approach to the lead character in the script, originally written by Gary Goldman and David Z. Upon its initial 1986 release, John Carpenter's action-comedy Big Trouble in Little China landed with a resounding thud at the box office. ![]()
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