Commando, Part 14
[00:22:32–00:24:16]
Synopsis
Matrix finishes putting the hat on the deceased goon’s head. A flight attendant walks by, and he asks how long the flight is. She tells him that they will land in Val Verde in exactly eleven hours. Matrix: “Thank you. And do me a favor. Don’t disturb my friend. He’s dead tired.”
The plane continues taxiing, and we see Sully in the airport, still watching it. Inside the plane, Matrix is walking down the aisle toward the back. A flight attendant stops him—“Sir, during takeoff you must remain seated.” Matrix, touching his stomach: “I’m airsick.” He continues walking back into one of the flight attendant areas. He finds a door, opens it, and goes inside. It’s a little elevator down into a storage compartment. He moves to the back of this section, where he finds big sliding door labeled “WARNING: CARGO AREA.” Matrix slides it open, and a dog in a kennel barks at him. Matrix sidles past.
Making his way through the cargo area, Matrix runs into a section of wall made of some kind of thick fabric; it says “CAUTION: DO NOT OPEN DURING FLIGHT” on it. He jams his fingers into it and rips the passageway open. Now he’s in a mechanical section of the plane’s underbelly. There’s a small window facing down. Matrix looks through it; below is the plane’s landing gear.
Outside, we see that the plane is rolling down the runway. Inside the airport, Sully puts on his sunglasses. He seems assured that the plane will depart with Matrix on board. He turns to leave the airport.
Back inside the plane, Matrix is looking around in the mechanical section. He finds a hatch to the outside of the plane. He begins climbing out, the tarmac racing past just feet below him. Matrix makes his way onto the landing gear, holding on for dear life just above the wheels, as this segment ends.
Analysis
We open with one of the film’s great one-liners—“Don’t disturb my friend. He’s dead tired.” The line is hilarious in and of itself, but the context makes it truly wonderful. For one, Matrix is continuing to dunk on this hapless goon even after he’s killed him—and even after the goon told him to stop wisecracking earlier. At the same time, Matrix is going out of his way to draw the flight attendant’s attention to the guy he has just killed, so confident is he of his blanket-pillow-hat coverup job. As usual for this movie, Schwarzenegger delivers the line with essentially a straight face, but just the faintest hint of a wry smile. This moment rules.
Logic takes a slight holiday again as the flight attendant tries to stop Matrix from walking through the plane, and he explains that he’s “airsick” on the still-taxiing aircraft. She doesn’t quite seem to buy it, but she does sort of stare incredulously at him as he continues on his merry way along the aisle. I feel as though today the crew would make a greater effort to stop something like this, but then again, I suppose it was the 1980s.
When Matrix enters the little door in the flight attendant area, we get into some fun stuff—the plane’s unseen underbelly. In the director’s commentary, Mark Lester reveals that they shot this sequence in an actual plane; this is what it really looks like down there. Matrix entering the elevator also signals that he knows a potential escape route is down there.
The barking dog is kind of a cheesy moment that feels like it’s here to artificially add a mild jump scare to the scene; even Matrix is startled by it, at least momentarily. Amusingly, the dog continues to bark in the same onscreen direction as Matrix sidles past it, suggesting that whatever its trainer is doing to make it bark is happening off-camera where Matrix was standing at the beginning of the shot.
When Matrix gets back into the mechanical section of the plane near the landing gear, there’s some effective filmmaking that makes the setting feel authentic. The sound design is great, featuring the muffled sound of a plane getting up to speed on a runway. And a slight camera shake really sells the idea that the aircraft is truly rumbling down the tarmac. Cuts to the exterior shots of the plane accelerating enhance this even further.
The shots of Matrix climbing down the landing gear look great—for me, a non-expert in special effects, it’s tough to tell how they actually did it, and at least in the few shots at the end of this segment, it looks like it’s actually Matrix doing it. Perhaps it’s green screen? Or maybe it’s a landing gear rig hanging from a truck or something. Whatever they did, it looks great.
