Commando, Part 21
[00:34:40–00:36:24]
Synopsis
Biggs, the security guard, looks at Matrix and radios for additional help: “Attention all units. Emergency on the theater level. Suspect six-foot-two, brown hair. He’s one gigantic motherfucker.”
Back inside the restaurant, Sully is having a gross conversation with his contact about picking up women. He looks around the crowded room and notices the flight attendant. She doesn’t see him, though. The flight attendant heads toward the door to see what happens to Matrix. Sully leaves his table and moves toward her.
Matrix sees the flight attendant looking at him from the restaurant. He realizes she has alerted the authorities, and the security guards converge on him. One guard approaches him: “What are you doing in here?” Matrix: “I’m waiting for my. . .” He trails off as he gestures to the restaurant, where the flight attendant is still looking at him. Just then, Sully comes up behind her, saying, “Hey, you lookin’ for me?”
Matrix turns back to the guards as one says, “You’d better come with us.” A fight ensues. Matrix punches one guard, then disarms and punches another. A guard comes at him with a nightstick and is punched. The commotion catches a shocked Sully’s attention—“What? Matrix!” He frantically asks the flight attendant for a quarter, reaches into her purse to grab one, and runs off toward the payphones. Matrix sees him running and gives chase.
Sully reaches a phone booth and gets inside. Matrix gets close, and Sully fires a shot from inside, cracking the booth’s glass window. Undeterred, Matrix runs up to the phone booth and begins shaking it. Then he picks up the entire phone booth and sends it toppling end over end with Sully still inside. Sully crawls out and runs for it, and a large group of security guards piles onto Matrix. In a display of raw power, Matrix throws more than a half-dozen grown men off himself simultaneously.
Analysis
Whew! As you can tell from the lengthy synopsis, this is an action-packed segment. There’s a lot to get into here. First of all, I want to call out Biggs the security guard again; he continues to make a strong impression in his minor role, putting a memorably emphatic spin on the phrase “one gi-gantic mo-ther-fucker.”
Matrix’s battle with the security guards is underscored by some great sound work; the punch impacts are loud, crunchy, and impactful in a way that really helps sell Matrix’s power. Those sound effects even keep the fight going offscreen—when Sully notices Matrix and desperately looks for a quarter to use a payphone, the camera holds on Sully and the flight attendant, but we get another punch sound in the background. Like so many little directorial choices in Commando, this helps the film maintain its intense momentum.
Of course, there’s a lot of stunt work in this sequence, though it does seem like Schwarzenegger is doing a fair bit of his own stuff. Even when he might not be, though, there’s some effective editing to camouflage that fact. A great example of this comes when Sully is running for the phone booth and Matrix turns to run after him. To get to Sully, Matrix has to leap over a railing and onto another level of the mall. This move is carried out in three quick shots. First, there’s a 24-frame shot of Matrix vaulting over the railing. Then, there’s a nine-frame shot of him falling through the air. Finally, there’s a fourteen-frame shot of him landing on the lower level and starting to get up. To my eye, only the third shot is definitively Schwarzenegger himself; the other two are too indistinct to tell for sure. But in real time, it flows together pretty seamlessly.
This segment has got some of the film’s most delightful displays of superhuman strength. Foreshadowed, perhaps, by his carrying of gigantic logs back at the beginning of the movie, Matrix yanks a phone booth out of the wall (sending sparks flying as the connective wires are ripped apart), hoists it overhead like he’s a statue of Atlas, and throws the booth end-over-end in front of a crowd of stunned shoppers. Then, to put the capper on that, he uses his raw muscle to knock back approximately nine security guards after they swarm him. This sequence of events may be the closest Commando gets to being a cartoon, and it’s awesome.
