Commando, Part 43
[1:12:48–1:14:32]
Synopsis
Cindy continues sending the radio message from the seaplane: “I repeat, General Franklin Kirby.” In a military office, Kirby is standing and studying a map. A uniformed women opens the door to the office. She calls out to him, “General Kirby? You’d better get out here, we have your message on the teletype.” Kirby hustles out of the room to get the message.
Back on the island, Matrix is holding a machine gun and moving through a forested area. Shots ring out, and he turns, crouches, and returns fire. He sprints a little further ahead, then takes cover in some trees at the edge of a grassy lawn that surrounds a large estate. Soldiers all around the building, as well as on the roof, take aim and shoot at Matrix. With a sustained burst of fire, he kills out several of them.
Matrix moves out of the trees and toward the estate, stopping to hurl a hand grenade at a group of soldiers nearby. More and more of Arius’s men emerge from the building, converging on Matrix’s position. Dashing into a courtyard, he takes cover behind some pillars while continuing to shoot back. He kills many of them, but he does not get hit himself. Matrix runs further ahead, ducks behind a low wall, and tosses another grenade. Then he emerges from the wall with a new weapon, a compact Uzi, and keeps shooting. Firing from the hip, he takes out a few more soldiers. Then he drops to one knee, pulls out a huge pistol, and eliminates a few more of the goons. Switching weapons again, he racks a shotgun and kills even more of the soldiers, some of whom get sent flying backward by the shotgun blasts.
Moving through a garden area between rows of flowers, Matrix continues to run, duck, and shoot. Then one of the soldiers tosses a grenade that lands in a flowerbed near him. He spots it, turns, and dives into some shrubbery. Matrix crawls away, hops a low wall, and heads toward a gardening shed.
Analysis
By my count, Matrix kills 33 people in an unbroken 77-second stretch of carnage from 1:13:01 to 1:14:18—approximately one kill every 2.3 seconds. It’s a huge action set piece, but for the most part it’s filmed relatively simply. Only a few times do we see Matrix shooting and a soldier getting hit in the same shot; for the most part we get shots of Matrix shooting, then we cut to the reverse shot of a soldier taking the hit and falling down. Splitting up the action and the reaction creates the potential for a hard-to-follow action scene, but the tight editing establishes a clear cause-and-effect logic to the sequence, and the geography remains clear.
Great stunt and prop work makes the scene come to life. The stunt performers portraying the soldiers don’t try to use realistic tactics, and they don’t react to bullets in the way a real person would. Instead, they are the perfect army of an 80s movie bad guy—they run en masse toward the protagonist, their aim is terrible, and when they get hit they go down in entertainingly cartoony ways. In other words, they’re ideal cannon fodder for Matrix’s super-soldier. A realistic portrayal would actually make the scene pretty disturbing, given the high volume of death on display. But the stuntmen here make it into popcorn-movie fun. The prop work is fantastic as well—the movie must have had an enormous armory of prop guns. In an era before CGI muzzle-flashes, whatever they’re doing to create realistic flashes and recoil looks great on camera.
The other thing about the stunts in this sequence is that in many cases it’s super obvious how they did them, but the effect is so cool that it doesn’t really matter—and it actually adds to the fun, in my opinion. Take the first time Matrix hurls a grenade in this scene. He tosses the grenade at a group of soldiers on the estate’s lawn. It explodes and sends two soldiers flying. You can very clearly see the boards that are flipping the stunt performers up into the air. This is something I’ve always noticed while watching the movie at normal speed, so it’s not even a slow-mo or freeze-frame discovery. There are just several frames of these big green boards sticking out of the ground. But it still works, and I actually think it’s pretty charming. The movie’s so confident in the scale and bombast of its action scene that it’s fine with a few of the seams showing through.
Matrix is seen moving at regular speed throughout this scene, but occasionally the soldiers getting hit is shown in slow motion to help accentuate the action. In one notable instance, once Matrix takes out his shotgun, he fires at two soldiers and sends them flying several feet up into the air and backwards. (In another slow-mo shot, a stuntman soldier who looks remarkably like Jay Leno gets hit.) Interestingly, the sound effects of these shots continue at normal speed even while the visuals are slowed down; the momentum of the scene is retained, but we still get a chance to linger on the shot.
The setting of this fight is an inspired choice. Earlier, when Matrix was just entering the compound, the buildings he blew up were on some dry, dusty ground. But now that he’s coming into the inner sanctum, he’s in an ornate courtyard with pillars, statues, topiaries, and carefully tended lawns and gardens. We saw before that Arius has a taste for luxury, with all the finery in his sitting room. Now Matrix is invading that classy, luxurious realm on his mission of rescue and revenge. The commando has little regard for neither Arius’s fancy decorations nor his soldiers. To underline this, in one shot we even see a burst of fire from Matrix take out both a statue and a soldier. And in one great bit of detail that I’m not sure how they pulled off, as Matrix runs past a row of flowers, we see the flowers getting chopped up and sent airborne by the soldiers’ errant bullets.
