Commando, Part 34
[00:57:12–00:58:56]
Synopsis
Cindy stands up in the stopped Cadillac, reaches into the back seat, and pulls out the rocket launcher. She takes aim at the police van driving away. She pulls the trigger, and a rocket goes shooting out behind her, blowing up a bus stop shelter—she was holding the rocket launcher backwards. Cindy looks back at the destruction and says, “Shit!” The cop in the passenger seat looks back out the window—“What the hell was that?” Cindy spins the rocket launcher around and takes aim again. The officers are looking in the side mirrors and realizing what’s going on, with the driver shouting, “Jesus Christ!”
Cindy fires the rocket, and the blast knocks her into the backseat of the Cadillac. The rocket hurtles through the air, striking the police van in its rear right tire. The explosion knocks part of the van into the air briefly, which sends it skidding across the road; it eventually flips onto its side and slides to a halt. Cindy gets back into the driver’s seat and pulls the Cadillac up to the burning van. Matrix, coughing from the smoke, climbs out of the wrecked van largely unharmed. One of the police officers, stunned, sticks his head out of the van and is apparently unhurt, too. Matrix gets into Cindy’s car and asks, “Where did you learn to do that?” “I read the instructions,” she replies. They drive off.
Meanwhile, at Arius’s island compound, the dictator is talking with Bennett. “What time do you expect Matrix to arrive in Val Verde?” Arius asks. Bennett checks his watch. “Just over two hours.” Arius: “Do you think that he is going to give us any problems?” Bennett confidently says, “He’ll do exactly as he’s told. As long as he thinks he’ll get his daughter back.”
Jenny remains imprisoned in the fancy room from before. She gets up off the floor and twists the handle of the door where she came in. It’s locked. She turns back to the other side of the room, where there are glass double-doors, boarded up on the outside. Jenny opens a glass door and checks the boards—they’re solidly in place, and there’s no clear way to escape. She returns to where she was sitting before, back to the wall and shivering.
Analysis
The rocket launcher bit is a great example of Commando’s intersection between action and humor. It makes total sense that a person couldn’t pick up a rocket launcher for the first time and expect to use it correctly, and we get to see that play out here with an unexpected explosion. (The rocket launcher involved is the M202 FLASH. In reality it used incendiary rockets, rather the normal explosives we see in the movie, but the four-barreled look definitely gives the weapon a menacing appearance on the screen.) Most viewers probably don’t know which end is which, so they might not realize before Cindy fires it that the weapon is backwards. There’s actually a subtle hint, though—you might notice that the weapon’s sight is on the wrong side when she’s holding it up and taking aim
The special effect of the rocket launches is really well done; in a very careful freeze-frame examination you can tell that the smoke trail from the backwards rocket begins offscreen, rather than from the weapon itself, but in real time it looks good. The explosion looks great, in part because we know that this is an actual explosion, not a CG fireball, and it’s really happening a short distance from the actor. The orange glow of the explosion reflects off the rocket launcher in a way that makes the shot feel super grounded when compared to poorly done modern effects.
All the pyrotechnics in the second rocket launcher shot are great, too—from the close-up of Cindy firing the weapon, to the rocket flying through the air, to the explosion on the van’s tire and the way the van flips, skids, and burns. It’s just a couple seconds of film, and it must have been extremely challenging and expensive to pull off, but it looks awesome. (And the over-the-top explosions here make it all the more nutty that Matrix is able to escape the burning wreck essentially unscathed—yet another bit of Matrix’s superhuman durability on display.)
I think the shot of the dazed cop emerging from the police truck is probably just there as a way of reassuring the viewer that Cindy didn’t just kill a couple of police officers while freeing Matrix, an indicator that there are still some moral limits in this comic book-y action movie.
Jenny’s examination of the room in which she’s held captive suggests that she’s inherited some of her father’s personality. Checking the door locks, assessing how firmly the boarded-up barrier is emplaced—these seem like the things a Matrix would do. She’s unable to find an angle at this point, but we know that the possibility of escape is on her mind.