Commando, Part 25
[00:41:36–00:43:20]
Synopsis
Matrix finishes walking over to Sully’s on-its-side yellow convertible. He shoves it over so that it’s sitting on four wheels again. “Now I do,” he says. They hop into the car, and the flight attendant asks, “What’d you do with Sully?” Matrix: “I let him go.” They drive off.
We cut to a dockyard area; the would-be dictator, Jenny, and Bennett have apparently arrived at their destination, having boarded a boat earlier in the movie. They climb into a jeep and motor along the dock toward a dark, nighttime landscape.
Back in LA, Matrix and the flight attendant are driving through the city. “I’m sorry I got you involved in this,” Matrix says. “Well, why don’t you tell me what this is all about?” the flight attendant responds. Matrix hands her his wallet with a photo of Jenny. “It’s about her.” “Is this your daughter?” the flight attendant asks. Matrix nods. “You know, some people are using her to force me to do a job. If I don’t get to her soon, they’ll kill her.” The flight attendant: “Well, did you do the job?” Matrix responds: “No. I know they will kill her even if I did it. My only chance now is that I get to her before they find out what I’m doing. All that matters to me now is Jenny.”
Elsewhere, the jeep rolls up to the dictator’s compound. Bennett roughly removes Jenny from the car, and they walk past armed guards into a building.
Analysis
First of all, up front in this segment we get the conclusion to Matrix’s setup with Sully (“I lied.”) from the last portion. If dropping Sully off a cliff was a fine steak dinner, Matrix’s next comment is a delicious slice of key lime pie. When the flight attendant asks about Sully, Matrix says that he “let him go,” which of course carries a delightful double meaning. (And even better, those two meanings have polar opposite outcomes for Sully—either he was free to leave, or he was dropped off a sheer cliff.) This is one of the film’s most sublime post-mortem one-liners.
(Side note here—we can clearly see here that the heavy driver’s-side damage caused by the crash is no longer present as Matrix and the flight attendant drive away.)
We get our first glimpses of the dictator’s compound. They took a boat to get here, so it seems likely it’s an island. We don’t see much of it in the nighttime darkness, but we do see illumination from of variety of buildings in the dockyard shot—it’s a sizable installation. We see a courtyard area when returning to the compound later in the segment. It’s fancy—columns, a water fountain, armed guards. Hanging in the courtyard is what appears to be the dictator’s flag. Since Matrix’s goal is to rescue Jenny, we should be seeing much more of the compound later in the film.
When we cut to the courtyard there’s a nice bit of foreground framing to add a little more flavor and menace to the shot. Out of focus on screen left is one of the compound’s armed guards. We see him move his rifle slightly, as if to make room for the jeep driving into frame, and then he’s just stationary for the rest of the shot. The jeep comes in from screen right and then drives almost directly away from the camera. The combination of the foreground guard and the jeep’s motion not only helps to clearly illustrate the depth of this courtyard space but also adds a sense of peril to even this short shot.
Matrix explains again to the flight attendant what the situation is, filling in some gaps that were missing from his earlier pleadings. He shows her a wallet photo of Jenny, helping prove that he’s not the crazy guy she thought he might be back at the mall. Her reaction to the photo also suggests that seeing it increases her sympathy for the daughter’s plight, making it more likely that she’ll continue to help Matrix. He tells the flight attendant for the first time that he’s being forced to do a job, and he also lets the audience know the reason he didn’t just go along with the mission—he’s confident that even if he did it, his daughter would be doomed.
(When we see a close-up of the wallet photo, we also see that Matrix’s California driver license is next to it—unfortunately, it’s mostly obscured by the flight attendant’s hand and the wallet’s card pocket, so we don’t get to see whether John Matrix smiled for his photo ID.)
