Commando, Part 9
[00:13:52–00:15:36]
Synopsis
The bad guy finishes his threat: “… you gotta cooperate. Right?” John turns back to him after watching his daughter being driven away by the other goons. “Wrong.” He shoots the bad guy in the head and runs outside. He heads for his truck to chase them down; noticing the hood is ajar, he lifts it and finds a mess of wires—it’s been sabotaged. But then John slams the hood shut and throws the driver’s-side door open anyway. Grabbing the A pillar and the door, he uses muscle power to push the truck forward. He reaches a steep incline, gets the truck just over the edge, and hops in.
The truck violently coasts down the hill; John is tossed around the cabin as he works the steering wheel. We cut to the bad guys in their car, and they realize he’s aiming for them—“He’s coming at us. No brakes.” He misses them once, but they appear to be driving down a series of switchbacks. After rolling roughly down the hill some more, John gets another shot at them. His truck is about to intersect the road as this segment ends.
Analysis
We open up with John’s abrupt response to the bad guy’s threat, and it’s apparent that he has a strict “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” policy. Notably, this guy is John’s first kill of the movie. There will be many more.
I don’t know a ton about cars, but when John dashes to his truck and realizes that it’s been made inoperable, him grabbing a handful of wires under the hood to indicate that the engine’s out feels a little silly. Then again, it does quickly communicate what’s going on, as opposed to having to spend time cutting to a closeup of a subtly snipped fuel line or whatever. As with many things in Commando, the logic sort of breaks down the more you think of it—but in the moment, as the action and the propellant musical score are pushing us forward, it all works.
John’s truck stunt—pushing it forward with pure muscle power and then taking an out-of-control ride downhill—at once shows off his physical strength, two-steps-ahead thinking, and desperation to get his daughter back. A handful of effective shots show much effort it’s taking to get the truck moving from a standstill. First, we get close-ups of his boots in the dusty, rocky soil. Then we see a close-up of his face, straining—a shot in which his face moves from one side of the frame to the other, rather than remaining centered in the frame, showing visually that he’s making progress with his great effort.
Once he gets going downhill, we shift into a vehicular action sequence. It consists mainly of John’s truck being subjected to extreme off-road punishment. The most intense jumps and slams happen in wide shots where the stuntman can be obscured; some of these are truly insane. They must have really messed up that truck filming this (and/or, they probably modified a vehicle to handle the stunt). In closer shots we see Schwarzenegger-as-John clearly through the windshield, or even from inside the truck. We even get some point-of-view shots where we’re slamming through some brush among the trees on the hillside. There are a lot of quick cuts here—not as staccato as the shooting sequence at the cabin, but the editing is brisk.
Throughout this sequence, the director and editor maintain consistent spatial relationships. John’s car heads downward and to the left, or occasionally straight toward the camera—but not to the right. And whenever the bad guys look at his careening car, they always look upward and to the right. The only exception to the downward-and-to-the left rule is when we’re getting the bad guys’ point of view—then we see John’s truck headed downward and to the right. The sudden change is actually a little jarring, and it’s an effective way to differentiate the antagonists’ perspective.
John is aiming at the goons’ cars but misses on his first pass. We see the near-miss in a point-of-view shot. One of goons also comments that he has no brakes. Now, it seems like the logical thing to do would be for the goons to simply slow to a stop and just hang out for a while, waiting for John to continue crashing down the hill. He might get hurt in a car wreck, or at least he’d be pretty far away from them. But instead, these guys just keep driving down the switchbacks, setting up a clean second pass for him. (Of course, the bad guys putting their cars in park and talking amongst themselves for a few minutes wouldn’t exactly make for a thrilling action scene.) As the segment ends, they see him coming again. One says, “He’s still coming, the crazy bastard. He’s gonna hit us!” (Again, I feel like this could’ve been avoided.) As of the end of this segment at 15:36, we don’t know whether the goon is right.
