Coming from the producers of Force , which reinvented the hardcore action entertainer genre in Bollywood, Commando provides you Stallone-Statham kind of raw stuff in desi environs. Vidyut Jamwal is as wooden as his much celebrated Hollywood counterparts. In fact there is line in the film which compares his face with a freshly ironed shirt and for those who don’t get this allegory director Dilip Ghosh makes Vidyut come out of a poster of John Abraham during a fight sequence. It is this honesty on the part of the makers that makes you invest in this formulaic fare. There is no pretension. What you expect is what you get. When he flexes his muscles other than facial, the boy has got some real brawn to show off and it makes this one-man army kind of harebrained entertainment enjoyable.
The villain is crucial in such films for he is the reason for unbridled violence and here Jaideep Ahlawat plays to the gallery with the flourish of a seasoned bad man. As the mobile maniac AK 74, he mixes menace with madcap element really well and Ghosh has given him the best one liners. As for the story, Ghosh relies on the tried and tested template. AK 74 is adamant on marrying Simran (newcomer Pooja Chopra). She runs away from his trap on a cycle and finds a commando Karanvir Dogra (Vidyut) along the way. Karanvir is fighting his own devils and in Simran’s case finds an excuse to clean the system from within. At this point Ghosh hands over the baton to stunt coordinator Franz Spilhaus and the screen comes alive with a seamless chase in the jungle. Unlike the aging Kumar and Devgn, Vidyut shows tremendous agility making the action believable and even the cliched stunts strike a chord. The only weak cog is Pooja. Trying to follow the footsteps of Kareena Kapoor, the former Miss India seems to believe that she is in a Jab We Met kind of situation. Trying to be cute, she ends up looking churlish. She lacks the innocence, something Genelia D’Souza generated with ease in Force . But still Commando has got enough firepower to survive in the hinterland.