Commando, Part 22
[00:36:24–00:38:08]
Synopsis
Now Sully’s contact from inside the restaurant joins the fray, running out into the mall holding a pistol and the red briefcase while saying “Out of my way!” He shoots one guard before another shoots him, sending him plunging off the mall’s upper level. The force of the shot knocks his briefcase out of his hand and opens it, and money begins fluttering down through the mall’s atrium.
Matrix is now beating up guards one by one. He turns to see Sully running away. As Sully flees, he spins to fire a few last-ditch shots from his pistol before escaping. One of those shots hits a security guard as Matrix begins chasing him.
Sully reaches a mall elevator and gets in; Matrix continues to tail him. A security guard takes aim at Matrix: “Stop! Or I’ll shoot!” The flight attendant is next to the guard, and she yells “No!” and knocks him down a flight of stairs.
Matrix watches Sully descend in the elevator on the other side of a wide atrium. He looks up at the large, colorful, tubular balloons we saw earlier. He grabs onto one, but then security guards descend on him and he starts fighting them. Matrix dispatches them with a series of kicks and punches, then reaches up to grab onto a balloon again. He rips it apart and hangs tight onto one of the ends. The balloon is anchored to the ceiling, so he is able to swing on it like a rope across the atrium, landing on the elevator with Sully inside.
Sully reaches the end of his elevator ride and runs out into the parking structure. Matrix hops off the top of the elevator and begins chasing Sully again, but he’s interrupted by yet more security guards. He wallops them with ease and then heads after Sully. Sully is already leaving; he hits Matrix with his car on the way out. Matrix gets back to his feet and gets into the red convertible. He starts the car and peels out of the parking spot. Sully races out onto the street, and Matrix is close behind. As the segment ends, the flight attendant leaves the mall and runs out to the street where Sully and Matrix are driving.
Analysis
Shortly after the phone booth action beat, the brawl has some more great material. Matrix picks up one guy and throws him at three other guys, knocking them all down—I think they probably could’ve gotten away with a bowling sound effect here, but they didn’t go there. And in another hand-to-hand fighting moment after that, some dynamic camera moves help sell the brutality and effectiveness of the action. Matrix smacks a guard in the head; we see both men from the upper torso up. Then Matrix hits him in the groin; the camera whips down to follow the action. Finally, Matrix elbows him in the face, sending him backward into a phone booth; the camera follows the action back up. This whole shot takes about 40 frames—less than two seconds of screen time. It serves as a solid close-up action beat to help break up the wider shots of the melee.
The sound design, film editing, and extra performances involved in Sully’s parting gunshots help convey the suddenness of the startling violence. The noise of the shot itself is sharp and loud against the backdrop of the screaming crowd and the musical score, and it tails off with a classic ricochet sound effect. It happens quickly—less than a second after we cut to Sully running away, he spins around, pulls out his gun, and fires a shot. And in this moment he’s surrounded by extras who are all reacting to him; those directly in his path move quickly to get clear, while those further away take slightly longer to realize what’s happening. All these factors combine to generate stakes and danger for Matrix—even if he’s been shown to be fairly superhuman.
Sully takes a second shot a few moments later, and a different effect is used. We get a significant muzzle flash from his pistol for two frames. In the first frame it is a large white splotch around the gun, but in the second frame the entire screen goes white. On the other side of the white frame we cut to the result of the gunshot, as one of the security guards gets hit. A squib goes off under his shirt, blood starts spurting out, and he has a full-body “getting shot” reaction. The full-screen flash makes for an effective cut, and the decision to treat this gunshot differently from the first one lends a sense of unpredictability to Sully’s violent acts.
There’s a great pathetic/funny moment after the flight attendant knocks the security guard down the stairs. Lying on the tile of the mall staircase landing, he looks up at her as she begins to run away. “Hey lady! Stop!” he yells. It’s almost as if he’s not upset at her for pushing him down the stairs—just disappointed.
This extended fight sequence has a lot of punching, but the director and stunt coordinators generally find ways to give each moment a unique spin. A nice example of this comes when Matrix is beating up security guards while trying to grab onto the balloons. A guard comes running up to him with a nightstick, and Matrix punches him in the face so hard that his hat goes flying off.
(Interestingly, I noticed for the first time while watching for this analysis that we actually see this distinct moment twice. And it’s not in quick succession for emphasis, as with an earlier example of a doubled-up punch in the film. We see it once in a wide shot, from essentially the flight attendant’s perspective, and then again about five seconds later in a closer shot that focuses on Matrix’s brawl. Potentially the intention could be that we’re just seeing overlapping slices of time in these shots, though that doesn’t necessarily come across while watching this sequence in real time.)
The balloon swing onto the elevator is a tremendous stunt. The stunt performer (because it’s plainly not Schwarzenegger in this case) swings across a huge portion of the mall and lands cleanly on the moving elevator. We see his face at the very end, but the stunt otherwise looks so good that it doesn’t really matter; I imagine that was the thought process for the director and editor, too.
There’s another nice stunt when Sully runs into Matrix in the parking garage; it’s a brief moment, but it’s an effective beat on a few levels. First, it’s one last bit of parting action for this lengthy mall sequence. Second, it again shows Matrix’s toughness, as he pretty easily brushes off being smacked by a Porsche. Third, it amps up the urgency—if Sully’s able to hit Matrix before Matrix can even get to his own car, that means Sully is that much further ahead in this chase. (One interesting thing I noticed for the first time on this viewing: as Matrix rolls across Sully’s hood, he knocks off the driver’s side mirror. I’m curious whether they’ll maintain that continuity throughout this chase. We’ll see!)
