Commando, Part 37
[01:02:24–01:04:08]
Synopsis
Cindy says that while she can’t go below marine radar, there may be another way: “Maybe if I get us close enough to the water, the waves can camouflage us.” Matrix agrees, saying, “Go down.” Cindy’s apprehensive, but she agrees to swoop down low. Back aboard the Coast Guard cutter Marauder, the plane suddenly disappears from the radar screen. The operator looks stunned and says, “We lost ’em, sir!”
At Arius’s compound, Jenny is attempting an escape. The door is still locked, but she’s able to jimmy its handle free using what appears to be some kind of jewelry. She takes the handle over to the other exit (the glass doors with the wood barricade) and begins to use the tool to dig into the wooden boards blocking the way. She hears guards talking in the hall and stops momentarily. But they pass by, and she continues to engineer her escape.
Elsewhere in the compound, Arius and Bennett are walking past a few of the dictator’s camo-wearing goons. One of them, holding a knife, stops Bennett to tell him, “Slitting a little girl’s throat is like cutting warm butter.” Bennett is not impressed. Standing arms akimbo, he says, “Put the knife away. And shut your mouth.” Bennett catches up with Arius and says, “I love listening to your little pissant soldiers trying to talk tough. They make me laugh. If Matrix was here, he’d laugh too.” Arius: “Mr. Bennett, my soldiers are patriots.” “Your soldiers are nothing,” Bennett retorts. “Matrix and I could kill every one of them—” He snaps his fingers. “—in the blink of an eye. Remember that.” Arius asks, “Are you trying to frighten me?” Bennett calmly responds, “I don’t have to try.”
Analysis
Jenny’s will to escape continues to show that she has the same persistence, determination, and grit as her father. The shots of her breaking off the door handle and beginning to dig through the barricade are both done from conspicuously unusual angles—the door handle shot as a medium shot from below, and the barricade shot as a wider panning shot from above. Part of this may just be that these are the optimal angles from which to see the action in each shot, but I think it’s also effective in context with the rest of the scene. When Jenny hears goons in the hallway and turns away from her escape attempt, it’s in a close-up, and the camera is right at eye level. The contrast between this shot and the earlier two helps to underline the fact that this is an interruption from her attempt at sneaking out. And after the voices of the bad guys fade, we come back to a close-up on Jenny working the door handle into the wooden barricade—as though the near-miss has led her to redouble the urgency and focus of her escape.
The attempted machismo of the soldier who interrupts Bennett is both disturbing and funny, though Bennett sees more of the latter. The interaction, as well as Bennett’s follow-up conversation with Arius, helps shed more light on Bennett’s relationships with both Arius and Matrix. First of all, Bennett continues to be unconcerned with appeasing Arius, who is ostensibly his employer in this situation; he criticizes Arius’s soldiers directly to the dictator’s face, calling their behavior laughable. Arius attempts to defend his men’s honor, but it’s clear that Bennett simply doesn’t care. In terms of the classic screenwriting framework of high-status and low-status characters, Arius has the higher status on paper. But Bennett’s attitude and dialogue demonstrate that he’s not impressed by the dictator.
After saying that the soldiers make him laugh, Bennett adds, almost wistfully, “If Matrix was here, he’d laugh too.” Despite his apparent hatred for Matrix expressed elsewhere in the movie, Bennett still has respect for him, and maybe even misses him in some way. It’s because, unlike Arius and his “pissant soldiers,” Bennett considers Matrix to be a peer, part of an elite company of commandos that truly understand the experiences of war. Then Bennett goes even further, imagining he and Matrix still teamed up, like in the old days: “Your soldiers are nothing. Matrix and I could kill every one of them in the blink of an eye. Remember that.” Yet by this point, Bennett surely knows that he’s high up on Matrix’s list of targets, if Matrix manages to make it out of this situation alive. This suggests that beneath his arrogant attitude is a subtle undercurrent of fear—his old comradeship with Matrix is over for good, and Bennett is now in the crosshairs.