Commando, Part 8
[00:12:08–00:13:52]
Synopsis
John hits the deck inside the house, and the wounded soldier crawls inside next to him. Gunfire continues to shatter the windows over their heads. John asks how bad he’s hit; the soldier says he’ll be all right. John says he needs to get his rifle from the shed. John: “Remember, you’re downwind. The air current may tip them off.” The soldier, incredulously: “Downwind? You think I could smell them coming?” John: “I did.”
John instructs Jenny to hide in her bedroom, and she goes there and crawls under the bed. Meanwhile, he heads outside to make his way to the shed. He arrives at the shed, avoiding the gunmen, and goes inside. There’s a large safe door with a keypad outside; he punches in some numbers (just two of them, apparently 1 then 3) and the door opens. Inside is a sizable stash of weapons, from which he grabs a pistol and a rifle—specifically a Beretta 92SB and a Heckler & Koch HK91A2 (thanks, Internet Movie Firearms Database.)
Back in Jenny’s bedroom, she’s still hiding under the bed. Someone enters the room, but we see only their feet; it’s not John, so it must be one of the goons. Having retrieved his weaponry, John moves back to the main house. He opens a door and the wounded soldier appears—only to fall over in the doorway, dead. John enters the room to find one of the gunmen from before, sitting alone in the room, holding the “I Love You Dad” paper heart from before. The bad guy: “Your daughter’s safe, colonel. Whether she stays that way is up to you.” As the bad guy continues speaking, John hears vehicles outside—he looks out the window to see two cars driving away down a dusty road. The bad guy, still talking: “My people got some business with you. And if you want your kid back, you gotta cooperate. Right?”
Analysis
As the bursts of gunfire come to a stop, the pumping musical score quickly returns, filling the aural gap. Even though the visual chaos has stopped, the tense audio prevents the audience from getting a break; this may be a lull in the action, but the scene still has more action to come. The opening chunk of this segment also further reinforces John’s special-ops chops, with his apparent ability to track his foes by smell leaving the “ordinary” soldier speechless.
We get another blast of “whoa, this guy means business” when John enters his tool shed. A gun safe locked with a sophisticated electronic keypad is already pretty serious. But when the door opens, we see that this is less a gun safe and more a gun walk-in closet. Several pistols and rifles line the wall. And in the back there even appears to be another gun safe door—presumably the most dangerous stuff is kept in there.
The tense music is still going as we return to Jenny’s room. We see her hiding under her bed in a floor-level shot. She glances off-screen, and then we immediately cut to her point of view, with her frilly bed sheets appearing, blurred, at the top of the frame to really sell the perspective. We see someone stride into the room from this angle; they’re wearing boots with a sheathed knife in one of them. We haven’t seen these boots before in the movie, so it’s not yet clear who we’re dealing with. The film then cuts back to the floor-level shot; now Jenny is looking at the out-of-focus boots in the extreme foreground. The scene cuts away before we find out whether this mystery person found Jenny.
When John returns to the house and finds the dead soldier in the doorway, the mechanics of the soldier’s situation are pretty unclear to me. John opens the door, and the bloodied soldier is standing there, off kilter and with a blank stare. Then the soldier falls forward through the door. Was he, like, propped up against the door? How did they get him to stand upright there? Did they somehow kill him the instant before John opened the door? The answers to these questions are unclear, but it is an effective beat—and in the middle of watching the action scene in real time, the precise logic isn’t a big deal.
After the soldier falls over, John enters the room. In an effective single shot, he sweeps the room while holding his rifle, and notices the room’s single occupant just before the camera’s tracking reveals to the audience who’s in the room. Even as the bad guy begins to explain that they’ve kidnapped Jenny, John has the presence of mind to listen for any useful information. He hears the cars driving away and quickly begins to piece together in his mind a solution to the problem. This segment ends with the bad guy saying, “Right?” Knowing John’s character, I suspect I know how he’s going to answer.
