Commando, Part 42
[1:11:04–1:12:48]
Synopsis
Matrix sprints away from the onrushing guards and pulls a detonator from his vest. He presses the button, and several buildings behind him explode. Bennett, walking through the halls of Arius’ mansion, hears the explosions. He says, “Welcome back, John. So glad you could make it.” Matrix leaves this part of the compound behind, heaps of smoking wreckage smoldering behind him.
Bennett arrives at the door to the room where Jenny is being held. He tries to open the door but the handle falls off, and he realizes that she has tampered with it. Muttering, “Little bitch!” he throws his shoulder into the door to bust it down. The room is empty, and one of the planks making up the barricade over the other door has been removed. Bennett crouches down to look through the hole, and he sees Jenny running off. He stands back up, bashes his way through the rest of the barricade, and pursues her.
A few soldiers are standing guard at a large gate. Matrix pops out from behind a corner with an assault rifle and kills them. He readies his rocket launcher to destroy the gate. A few more soldiers hop in a truck, drive toward Matrix from behind, train their guns on him, and open fire. Matrix spins and fires the rocket launcher at the truck, destroying it and sending the soldiers flying. Then he turns back to the gate and fires a rocket at it, too, opening his path ahead. Multiple soldiers run after him, shooting at Matrix as they give chase.
Back at the seaplane, Cindy is talking on the radio. “Commando. I say again, Commando. This is Whiskey X-Ray Four Four Eight. I have an emergency priority message for a General Franklin Kirby!”
Analysis
This segment lingers on some awesome, gratuitous shots of giant explosions—all practical, of course. The explosions don’t make a whole lot of logical sense. We saw Matrix place a couple of claymore mines, but those are anti-personnel weapons that blast metal shrapnel in a fan-shaped pattern, not explosives that would blow up whole buildings. Perhaps he placed explosives that we didn’t see—he must have done this to some extent, because the number of exploding buildings exceeds the number of mines he placed—but the clear implication is that those mines are responsible for all these explosions. This isn’t a problem, though, because the shots are super cool. The shots of him placing the mines establish that he’s going to be causing explosions, and the exact nature and number of those explosions is relatively unimportant. (Notably, the top level of one of the guard towers blows up, even though Matrix never climbed up there. Still—it looks cool.)
The explosions themselves are totally over the top, in the best way. The buildings basically fly apart, with debris going everywhere and huge fireballs visible. There are some very obvious mannequins standing outside them, but the overlaid sound effects of yelling guards and explosions helps sell the connection of these shots to the rest of the action. In one shot of buildings exploding, the subtle inclusion of a presumably-remotely controlled Jeep driving by helps make things feel more real, too. We see the same explosions multiple times from different angles, so the production was able to maximize the value they got out of these expensive pyrotechnics. Only one shot includes live actors, and it’s a great one. Matrix runs away from the explosions, chased by four soldiers. As the blasts go off, the soldier are knocked to their feet. (Or, if you’re watching very carefully frame-by-frame, they clearly jump at slightly different times under their own power—but it still looks great in motion.) The final shot of this explosion sequence is a slow-mo shot of a screen-filling explosion, including the memorable image of a barrel blasted into the air like a rocket.
After the explosion montage, we cut to Bennett, who is hearing and/or seeing the blasts from Arius’ mansion. In a somewhat bizarre choice, he’s softly caressing the pointy end of his knife as he realizes that Matrix is coming. Is it meant to indicate how psychopathically excited he is to kill Jenny? Is it intended to be something homoerotic involving Matrix? Is he just checking how sharp his knife is? Unclear, but it’s one of many ultra-specific directing or acting choices with Bennett that make him such an interesting villain. Following the brief Bennett scene, we return to a few more shots of the same buildings exploding again—the filmmakers are really getting their money’s worth out of those explosives.
When Bennett realizes Jenny has gotten away, there’s a subtle visual parallel to an encounter between them earlier in the film. Back at the Matrix family cabin, Jenny hid under her bed, and we watched from her prone point of view as Bennett cornered her. Now, Jenny has escaped by removing one of the low planks on the barricade over the door, and Bennett is forced to crouch down to take a look. We get a shot from his own prone point of view as Jenny makes her getaway.
Before now, we haven’t gotten a very clear sense of Bennett’s physical prowess. Clearly he’s less-muscled than Matrix, but as he bashes through the wooden barricade we see that he’s no pushover. Henchmen have been carrying out much of the hands-on work in fighting Matrix up to this point, but here we are reminded that Bennett himself may actually be a threat when it comes to the final showdown.
One of the most iconic weapons in the movie is the four-barreled rocket launcher, and Matrix uses it to great effect here. When he lifts it to his shoulder, the camera slightly tracks the movement upward, helping to give the weapon a little weight. The part when he blows up the truck is fantastic. First of all, when the soldiers jump into the truck and prepare to drive toward him, the director includes some flames in the foreground, just to add a little move visual interest into an otherwise simple shot of people getting into a vehicle. Then, the actual stunt is excellent, with multiple guys leaping from a truck that is going fast, getting airborne, and on fire. There are a few minor continuity flubs—in one shot the truck is turning toward Matrix with nothing in its way, then after it is hit it is suddenly running into a pile of crates—but I never really noticed those when watching the movie normally.
The final shoot of this sequence is of the seaplane, floating in the water while Cindy calls in her message to General Kirby as promised. Something about this shot in motion feels weirdly off to me—as if it’s in slow motion somehow or the frame rate is being lowered. I don’t know why they would do this; maybe the plane was rocking on the waves a bit too much at normal speed, and the director thought it looked distracting? Or they didn’t have enough footage of the plane, and simply had to stretch it out? Though that feels unlikely. In any event, Cindy has fulfilled her promise to Matrix to call in the military, so it’s clear that she’s with him to the end of this ordeal.