Country and Year: India (1988)
Director: Babbar Subhash
Starring: Mithun Chakraborty, Mandakini, Hemant Birje, Amrish Puri, Bob Christo

Review By: Jeff
Rating: 2 1/2 out of 4 stars (above average)

Throughout the 1980s, the triumvirate of B. Subhash, Bappi Lahiri, and Mithun Chakraborty created some of the most entertainingly trashy movies that Bollywood has ever produced.

Each of these fellows is noted in his own right. As the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema diplomatically puts it, the music of Bappi Lahiri is notorious for its “open rejection of originality.” However, even when Bappi’s songs are, ahem, at their most “unoriginal,” they often surpass their “inspirations” through their reverb-drenched, sleazy vibe and offbeat arrangements. For example, who wouldn’t prefer to listen to Bappi’s cheery, harmonica-drenched campfire singalong “Tarzan, My Tarzan” rather than the song that presumably “inspired” it, Nena’s “99 Red Balloons“?

However, famous though Bappi may be, his legend is surpassed by that of Mithun, who amassed an enormous, rabid following in rural India during the 1980s for his super-low-budget action movies (many of which he self-produced). Indeed, Mithun is reputed to have been at one time the largest taxpayer in India! B. Subhash had a great success sans Chakraborty in The Adventures of Tarzan, a truly mad take on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s character featuring lots of poorly matched stock footage of wildlife and what may be the raciest wet sari scene in the history of Indian cinema.

However, with this trio the sum was truly greater than the individual parts. Together, they are best known for a series of disco-inflected films, which started with the mind-boggling Disco Dancer. Many words
have been expended in praise of Disco Dancer, and it is easy to see
why. Its mixture of crazy costumes, delirious set pieces, some of Bappi Lahiri’s best songs, and a punchy two-hour running time have extended its fanbase in the West far beyond the usual audience for this stuff. The trio’s disco output continued with Kasam Paida Karne Wale Ki (which added an action-packed revenge plot and a re-creation of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video to the basic disco formula) and Dance Dance (which features some of the most regrettable attempts at breakdancing that have ever been captured on film). The primary aesthetic influence for these films appears to have been Menachem Golan’s future-kitsch glam rock/disco opus The Apple. (The trio recently reunited for a movie entitled Classic Dance of Love, which I can only recommend to the most hardened, masochistic viewers of dreck. Check out an appreciation here that is far more entertaining than the film itself.)

With Commando, the trio ventured beyond the world of disco, if not beyond Menachem Golan’s artistic shadow. Commando seems directly inspired by the action cheese that Golan’s Cannon Pictures served up in the 1980s. And it features ninjas! Lots of ninjas!

In Commando, Mithun plays Chander, a guy who was trained by his father since childhood to become a top soldier (mostly by doing wiggly push-ups that my gym teacher would never have let me get away with). Years after witnessing his father die in the line of duty protecting Indira Gandhi from a cabal of multi-national assassins, Mithun signs up to work as a private commando for a munitions factory (for all I know, this could be a real job, but somehow I doubt it). As it turns out, the same international bad guys who killed Mithun’s father are in cahoots with various middle managers at the factory to siphon away arms for their own nefarious purposes.

The international bad guys are led by one Marceloni (played by the ubiquitous Amrish Puri - Mr. India, DDLJ, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), and include a ninja master, who is usually referred to simply as “Ninja.” The bad guys plan a robbery of an arms convoy that Mithun and his co-commandos are defending. Although the commandos are instructed by their corrupt bosses to refrain from defending their cargo through force, that is precisely what Mithun does, running off with the boss’s daughter, Asha, in the process [American Ninja, anyone? - Dave]. Asha and Mithun run across the “border” to what alternatively appears to be China and/or Pakistan, where their escape from the bad guys is aided by a comic relief character who sings an escape song to the tune of the Colonel Bogey March with them. Luckily, the comic relief guy’s car features all kinds of buttons that shoot out bad-guy-stopping projectiles and even allow the car to fly.

During the film’s somewhat tedious second act, Mithun is promoted to the rank of officer and wins the respect of his comrades through various feats of bravery, while at the same time falling in love with Asha. This makes the officers who are in cahoots with Marcelloni jealous, so they lock him in a warehouse with ninjas. Mithun fights his way through the ninjas with a samurai sword and is framed for killing some police officers.

Marcelloni then kidnaps Asha, demanding her father’s weapons as ransom. The Indian government commissions Mithun and his friend to go undercover in a “neighboring country” (the polite name for Pakistan in 1980s Bollywood films) to take down Marcelloni and rescue Asha. They proceed to do so after a rendezevous with Mithun’s childhood friend, who is now an undercover agent. (She has changed her name to Zum Zum and is posing as a “dancer” for Pakistani military officers.) Lots of explosions and a fight in a cable car follow.

I don’t want to overstate the amount of ninja content in Commando; it merely comprises one of the many plot elements in this two-and-a-half hour film, along with the usual romantic scenes and a subplot involving the mental illness of Mithun’s mother than I have heretofore ignored. However, every moment the ninjas are on screen — be it a fight scene, a chase scene, or a ninja training camp scene — is pure magic. While their footsteps are awfully noisy for practitioners of ninjitsu, their costumes are pretty cool, and they do a lot of flips and somersaults. I especially savored the ninja training scenes; who doesn’t love a ninja on a trampoline?

All of the film’s action scenes — even the ones without ninjas — feature the same kind of minimally choreographed high-energy brawls and explosions for their own sake that make 1970s Turkish cinema so much fun. There is even a truck that crashes through a brick wall. I don’t recall whether any fruit carts are overturned during the chase sequences, but I would not be surprised if there were.

With respect to the minuses, the musical numbers (usually a Subhash/Lahiri highlight) are, shockingly, mostly a bore. The songs are some of Bappi’s least memorable, and Subhash’s stagings are uninspired. Indeed, the film’s only memorable music is the Star Wars theme, which is repeatedly used to underscore action scenes. This time, I guess the filmmakers’ hearts were not in the music.

In short, if you are the type of glutton for punishment who is intrigued by the idea of a Bollywood ninja movie, then Commando is the film for you. If you are more sensible than myself and find the idea of a Bollywood hero taking on a horde of ninjas to be somewhat less than an irresistible proposition, then by all means do something better with your time.

© Jeff