Commando, Part 44
[1:14:32–1:16:16]
Synopsis
Matrix enters the gardening shed and closes the door behind him. Inside, he takes off his tactical vest and touches his side in pain. Soldiers surround the shed; Matrix hears them. One soldier calls out, and they all open fire, unloading hundreds of rounds into the shed. After several seconds they cease fire. One of the soldiers moves toward the shed to look inside. He opens the door to find it empty, but as he walks inside he is stabbed in the chest with a pitchfork from above—Matrix was hiding in the rafters. Next Matrix hurls a saw blade through the window at another soldier, slicing off a portion of his scalp. He chucks another saw blade into a soldier’s chest. Then he grabs an axe and a machete from the wall and exits the shed.
Matrix swings the axe up into the crotch of the first soldier he sees. He spins around, grabs another soldier’s arm, and uses the machete to chop it off at the elbow. There are now several fallen men around him; Matrix crouches down to pick up one of their machine guns and opens fire on more troops running toward him. Still more soldiers run out from their compound to confront him. Elsewhere, Jenny runs down some stairs into an industrial/mechanical space filled with concrete, brick, steel, and various machinery. Bennett is just a few seconds behind her. Back in the courtyard, machine gun in hand, Matrix dives behind some shrubbery for cover. He pops up and opens fire.
Analysis
When Matrix enters the gardening shed, we get a classic glimpse of his tactical awareness. Even though he’s hurt his side, before he tends to his wound he looks around the shed to identify any possible weapons. We get a point-of-view shot of him looking at pitchforks and an axe, which then pans over to some saw blades. In a fairly on-the-nose move, the camera zooms in on the blades after it finishes panning. The zoom looks a little cheesy—perhaps it was simply done to make the blades look bigger in the frame after the pan, since they’re much smaller than the pitchforks. But it could also be interpreted as a subjective point-of-view shot, where the zoom represents Matrix focusing on the blades and thinking how he might use them against the soldiers. In any case, the shot prepares us for Matrix’s next move; he may be surrounded, but his quick thinking will offer him a way out.
The sequence in which the soldiers shoot up the shed is another impressive display of sound design and practical weapon effects. The chaotic audio helps sell the ferocity of the fusillade. Once the soldiers’ leader orders them to cease firing, one last, late shot rings out, and then in the sudden quiet we hear the call of a bird, accentuating the silence. As before, the guns themselves look realistic, with muzzle flashes, recoil, and ejected casings. But here, we also see the effect of hundreds of bullets on a structure in the immediate vicinity. The results look great, with dozens of bullet impacts on the wood, shattered glass, and, as the smoke clears—literal smoke clearing. Some seams are visible when advancing frame by frame; in one shot we can see a set of bullet holes appearing simultaneously between one frame and the next, suggesting that whatever mechanism they were using to create the holes was making the impacts in clusters, rather than individually. But in motion the sequence looks great. The quick editing alternates between close and medium shots of the soldiers shooting, close shots of the bullet impacts on the shed’s walls and windows, and wide shots showing all the soldiers. We don’t see Matrix at all during the shooting. The audience can feel pretty certain that he’ll survive the attack, but of course the soldiers don’t know that, so the choice not to show him here helps give the viewer the perspective of the soldiers.
This effect is heightened in the next shot, when one of the soldiers approaches the shed and we get his perspective, following him in a handheld over-the-shoulder shot as he moves toward the bullet-riddled door. He opens it, and the camera essentially takes on his point of view, moving past him, entering the shed, and beginning to look around the empty space. The final shot from the soldiers’ perspective is when the pitchfork launches in from the top of the frame to stab this soldier in the chest. Then Matrix swings heroically down from the rafters and goes into action, and we’re back with him again.
Earlier Matrix used knives to kill soldiers in multiple distinct ways, and now he gets a chance to improvise with gardening tools. By this point the audience knows what he’s capable of, so the anticipation for cool and innovative kills is high, and this sequence pays off. The deaths here are fairly up-close-and-personal and gruesome, in contrast with most of the relatively bloodless guns-from-afar kills in the compound so far. They come in a quick, escalating succession, too—the pitchfork to the chest is surprising because it comes out of nowhere, and then the saw blade to the skull effect is gorier. Next we get the visceral impact of the axe to the groin, and finally this portion is capped off by Matrix literally chopping a guy’s arm off. After that Matrix picks up a gun, and we return to more familiar gunplay territory. The gardening shed sequence is a great way to break up an extended firefight, changing the pace and keeping things fresh as Matrix makes his way toward Arius.
We get one of Commando’s iconic shots once the firefight resumes. Matrix picks up a machine gun from one of the fallen soldiers near the shed and starts firing it. We get a shot of him shooting the gun while shirtless, framed to show him from the shoulder to the hip. In other words, it’s essentially a shot of an ultra-muscular chest shooting a machine gun—it doesn’t get much more quintessentially 80s action than that.
