Commando, Part 19
[00:31:12–00:32:56]
Synopsis
Sully pulls into a parking spot, and we see from signage in the background (“GALLERIA”) that he’s at a mall. He gets out of the car with a red briefcase and heads into the building, unaware of his pursuers. As he leaves, Matrix and the flight attendant park nearby. Matrix gets out to follow Sully, and he brings the flight attendant with him.
Inside the mall, Sully ascends in an elevator. Matrix and the flight attendant are close behind on an escalator. They pause for a moment on the upper level, and Matrix explains more about the situation: “Listen to me. My daughter has been kidnapped. He’s the only chance I’ve got of finding her. If he sees me or I lose him, they’ll kill her. What I need you to do is follow him, tell him you’re crazy about him, try to bring him over here, and I will do the rest. And you can go back to your normal life. Got it?” Her answer: “No!” Matrix asks, “Please, help me. You’re the only chance I’ve got!”
Analysis
This segment is light on dialogue—for the most part, the audio consists of the film’s typical “chase music” score, which has a driving synth beat, bombastic horns, and more than a little steel drum. There’s an effective cut that takes us from the music-heavy audio mix, used in the shots where Matrix and the flight attendant follow Sully into the mall, to a dialogue-heavy mix, used where Matrix is further explaining his predicament. As Matrix and the flight attendant reach the escalator landing, the chase music comes toward a gradual crescendo. The music rising, we cut from a wide shot following Sully through the mall to a close-up of Matrix watching him. It’s by far the closest shot of a character we’ve seen in this sequence so far, so it really stands out. The crescendo peaks here, almost exactly as we cut to the shot of Matrix talking to the flight attendant. We can still hear a bed of tense music under the dialogue scene—the music has been taken down a few notches, not removed outright. But the edit at the music’s crescendo is an effective way to transition us into a new phase of this chase, keeping the tension and drama high even as the action onscreen slows down.
Twice in this segment, the director uses panning shots to show where the characters are in relation to each other. This is a smart way to establish the geography of the scenes, and is especially important in a chase context, where the characters’ proximity to each other is a key part of the scene’s drama. The first example comes in the Galleria parking structure. Sully gets out of his yellow convertible, closes the door, then walks away from the camera and toward screen left, moving toward the mall entrance. The camera pans left to follow him, then keeps going, passing its gaze over other cars in the lot before acquiring the red convertible. The car pulls into a spot almost nose-to-nose with Sully’s vehicle, and the camera follows it, panning back to the right a little bit as the flight attendant parks it. By doing this all in a single shot, we see how close Matrix and the flight attendant are to Sully—both spatially, since they parked right nearby, and temporally, since we’ve watched exactly how much time has elapsed since Sully arrived.
The next panning shot happens inside the mall. Sully has taken the elevator to the mall’s upper level, and he exits the elevator to screen left (creepily leering at some women along the way). We then pan down and to the right, eventually landing on Matrix and the flight attendant ascending the escalator in pursuit. Along the way we get a better sense of the mall’s geography. We see that there are multiple tiers to the mall—at least 3, it looks like—and there are also huge, cylindrical balloon-looking decorations strewn through the mall’s open-air spaces. We also see that the mall is pretty crowded. It seems likely that some or all of these facts will be come into play as our heroes close in on Sully. And again, the panning shot also serves to show how close they are to their target.
