Mickey Rourke
has made some bad movies, but one of his worst rated films is finding some unexpected love after climbing up the 
STARZ
streaming chart. In fact, only the mighty presence of Spider-Man: No Way Home and Venom: Let There Be Carnage has kept the universally panned The Commando
off the top spot.
Released in 2022, The Commando is described as an “edge-of-the-seat” action thriller, which sees an elite DEA agent – played by Michael Jai White – discover that there is a stash of $3 million hidden away in his home, and a newly released criminal (Rourke) and his violent gang want it back. It sounds like a cliché, walks like a cliché, talks like a cliché, and surprisingly was buried under a pile of cliché-filled, appalling reviews.
Action movies need to deliver fist-fights, car chases, explosions and link them all together with a story that makes only the barest of logical sense. While The Commando does have such a plot, it seems only enough to fill a 15-minute short, and the rest of the time isn’t filled out with thrills, but instead so much padding the seams have well and truly burst.
With only four critics’ reviews on Rotten Tomatoes – three incredulously from some of the site’s top critics – The Commando has no percentage generated, but with all four being categorically “rotten,” it seems unlikely that they would have prevented the movie becoming Rourke’s second 0% Tomatometer score in as many years following 2020’s The Legion.
Is ‘The Commando’ Mickey Rourke’s Worst Movie?
The action movie is certainly near the bottom of the pile when it comes to Rourke’s films, and a far cry away from his impeccable performance in 2008’s The Wrestler or his much earlier Body Heat from 1981. However, it seems hard to blame everything on the actor, as the reviews make it clear that no one comes out of it smelling of roses. As the New York Times’ Glenn Kenny put it:
“A spectacularly atrocious, ostensible action thriller, “The Commando” is distinguished by an incompetence that extends even to locations.”
If this was not brutal enough, Jonathon Wilson of Ready Steady Cut admits “if I wasn’t professionally obligated to sit through a film until the credits, I probably wouldn’t have bothered,” and Variety’s Rene Rodriguez‘s assessment that The Commando is “an inept crime drama stuffed with banal dialogue and irrelevant supporting characters.”
Audiences sometimes find that glimpse of goodness in movies that critics despise, but The Commando is not one of those movies. Instead, the repeated sentiment is “the worst movie I have seen in a long time,” “it’s hard to see why this movie was made,” and, the old classic, “downright embarrassing.” This suggests, reading between the lines, that the film should probably not be currently challenging two Marvel juggernauts for supremacy on Starz.
Related
Best Mickey Rourke Movies, Ranked
When he returned to acting, fans remembered how much Mickey Rourke adds to the movies he stars in, so let’s take a look at his best films.
The world of free streaming, though, is a place of equal opportunity, where the biggest and best movies compete on a level field with some of the worst movies of all time. Something about The Commando is drawing in viewers looking for something to pass the time, even if those who do watch may be wishing they had chosen to spend their time more wisely.