Commando, Part 20
[00:32:56–00:34:40]
Synopsis
Matrix continues pleading his case about his daughter’s plight to the flight attendant: “She has less than ten hours left. Don’t you understand? They’re going to kill her!” She finally agrees, saying, “Okay, all right. I’ll help you,” and she begins walking across the mall toward Sully. Matrix watches from afar as she leaves. Then he turns to see where Sully is—he’s walking into a restaurant. The flight attendant looks back at Matrix, and he motions for her to follow Sully inside. Matrix checks his watch: 9:40:05. 9:40:04. 9:40:03.
Inside the restaurant, and out of sight of Matrix, the flight attendant finds a mall security guard. “Listen, there’s this huge guy outside in a green T-shirt, and he’s a paranoid maniac, and he’s kidnapped me, and I need your help.” The guard says he’ll check it out.
The flight attendant looks over to where Sully is seated, and we see what business he’s getting up to. He’s speaking to a man in a hat. Sully shakes the man’s hand and says, “I hear you’re a great man with transmissions.” Then the man reaches into a pocket, pulls out an envelope, and hands it to Sully under the table. Sully checks what’s inside: passports.
The security guard emerges from the restaurant to see what the flight attendant was talking about. Matrix is still watching, and when he sees the guard he hides behind a pillar. The guard looks around and then goes back into the restaurant. He radioes a fellow guard: “Biggs, are you there? Listen, there’s a guy over here that may be a whacko. I don’t think I can handle him alone.” Biggs, on the other end of the line, was in the middle of talking to two women in the mall. “I’ll be right there,” he says into the radio. Back in the restaurant, the security guard tells the flight attendant, “You’d better wait here, miss,” and he turns to confront the potential whacko.
Analysis
The music does a lot of heavy lifting in this sequence. As the flight attendant walks away from Matrix and toward Sully, the score kicks into high gear, emerging back into prominence in the audio mix once the dialogue ends. There’s a lot going on—propulsive percussion, a steady synth beat, some real wild horns, and a pan flute. (!) What actually happens in this scene isn’t especially exciting on its face: a woman walks through a shopping mall while a man watches her. But the score injects a ton of drama, maintaining the high urgency and energy level of the movie.
Speaking of urgency, we get another close-up shot in this sequence of Matrix’s wristwatch. But this time the director adds a slight twist to heighten the tension. As Matrix looks down at his wrist, the camera slowly zooms in on his face. Then we cut to the watch, and the zooming continues. We never hold steady on the watch—we keep zooming all the way up until the cut, which takes us inside the mall restaurant as the flight attendant enters. Like the musical score, kinetic camerawork like this, simple as it may be, helps the film maintain its momentum.
Commando has a handful of great one-off characters who are tangential to the plot, appearing only briefly but adding some nice flavor to the movie; the mall security guard Biggs is one of them. Played by Gregory W. Elam—known mostly for his stunt work—Biggs gets called on the radio just as he’s apparently in the middle of flirting with some shoppers. He’s asked to provide support in taking on the muscleman-slash-whacko, then turns to the women, smiles, and says, “Wanna see me kick some ass?” This is a total throwaway line, not relevant to the plot at all, but it adds some extra humor into the scene; it’s yet another example of how committed Commando is to being relentlessly entertaining.
Now, I’m a big shopping mall fan in general, so I watched this portion of the film with particular interest in seeing what stores I could identify in this circa-1985 Galleria. You don’t get a ton of clear shots of in-focus storefronts, but here are the ones I spotted:
- Swensen’s (Ice cream—still exists.)
- Kirwin’s Restaurant & Bar, the restaurant that is the focus of this scene
- Some kind of pretzel place
- Some kind of pizza place
- Smooth Moves (Smoothie place, I think? Very hard to find any sign of this place on the internet.)
- The Gap (clothing—still exists)
See this excellent resource for additional research on the mall.