Commando, Part 2
[00:01:45–00:03:27]
Synopsis
The man is walking down his driveway, trash cans in hand, hailing the sanitation workers. They hop down from the truck and he remarks, “Was afraid you’d miss me.” The workers pull out guns from the back of the truck and aim them at the man. One of them—the worker wearing the nice watch—says, “Don’t worry. We won’t.“ They open fire on the man with a long burst of automatic fire, felling him. One of the workers steps forward to pump more lead into the man for good measure. The workers walk back to the truck, toss their guns in, and drive off.
We cut to a car dealership. A slick car salesman is explaining the virtues of American workmanship to a customer. That customer is the sanitation worker with the nice watch—only now he’s traded in his uniform for a gray three-piece suit. He climbs into the driver’s seat of a Cadillac as the salesman continues to work on him, going on about the vinyl seats. The customer turns the ignition, and the salesman continues to extoll the car’s power. The customer: “You know what I like best?” The salesman: “What’s that?” The customer: “The price.” The customer throws it into reverse, knocking over some showroom signage. Then he accelerates forward, running into the salesman, smashing through a plate-glass window, and speeding away.
Cut to a dockyard. A man wearing a coat, beanie, and conspicuous moustache walks along the dock. He hops aboard a small boat with a few other men on it and says “Hi guys, how’s it going?”
Analysis
We’re very much in the setup phase of the movie here, and it’s starting to become clear that we might be seeing a series of separate assassinations that set off the plot of the film. The sanitation worker/showroom customer is the only common link between the scenes so far, and in both cases he’s killed someone. (Once he pulls down his bandana before opening fire, we see that the actor is Bill Duke, who is great in the role.) Though we haven’t seen him at the dockyard yet as of 3:28, there’s a suspicion in the viewer that he can’t be far away.
Commando’s stock-in-trade is its mix of violence and humor, and that’s plain from the start—one of the film’s very first exchanges of dialogue here is a murderous quip. And in terms of filmmaking, the driveway scene is well-executed, pun very much intended. After those languorous shots of the garbage truck driving through the neighborhood, the burst of gunfire is shown in a series of quick cuts to accentuate the sudden violence. There are a total of nine shots between the time the guns are fired and the time the man hits the ground. In a nice touch of sound design, the silence after the gunfire is filled with the sound of distant neighborhood dogs barking.
Using a J cut—that is, a cut in which the next scene’s audio begins playing before we visually cut to that scene—the movie next brings us into the car dealership. That provides some continuity with the garbage scene, and then the appearance of the (still-unnamed) customer helps drive that continuity home. The salesman has a very 1980s bit of dialogue as he tries to sell the Cadillac: “Now that is American workmanship. You think the Japanese invented that? Bullshit. We did. Oh, for a while there we lost it. But we got it back.” He twice addresses the customer—who is Black—as “brother.” Through his dialogue the salesman is painted as a character who is either prejudiced himself, or is willing to play on that to make a sale—though of course there’s not much difference there.
Then we come to the “price” quip, which, again, is not the movie’s best, but suits the scene fine. Maybe even funnier is the salesman’s reaction when the customer backs into some signage inside the dealership—an outraged “Hey! Wait a minute! You can’t drive that car in here!” There’s some solid stunt work as the customer launches the car through the salesman and the window, the salesman hanging onto the hood as bits of glass cascade around him.
After both the driveway murder and the car dealership murder, we get close-ups of the bloodied bodies. In the case of the dealership, we even get a dolly-in shot, with the camera physically moving closer to the guy on the pavement, as if to fully emphasize that he’s dead.
So, in both of the first two scenes, we had the same assassin, a pre-death quip, and a close-up on the victim. That makes our next cut, to a seemingly innocuous dockyard scene, feel much more ominous than it might seem in isolation. The man with the moustache, a new character, seems like he might be the next victim. (He’s portrayed by the Australian actor Vernon Wells.) As a result, the viewer is on high alert as he jauntily hops a rail onto the boat and greets the two sailors.