Most Rewatchable Scene
Garden shed fight; opening sequence; plane escape
In the discussion (24)
Approx. transcript time · 00:19:08Read transcript
- The movie starts well: a garbage-truck hit, and Bill Duke is involved in three killings within about the first minute and a half; there is no fat and it moves from the start.
- The first rewatchable scene is the daughter's kidnapping, set up by a shirtless wood-chopping montage and a father-daughter montage of ice cream, hiking, feeding a deer and fishing, called the greatest father-daughter day ever seen.
- Hiding under the bed is criticized because it is the first place kidnappers look.
- The twins are told to run out the window rather than hide, since they can outrun almost anyone. — Shea Serrano
- Under the bed and lying in the bathtub (as in Training Day) are standard movie hiding places; Taken uses almost the same under-the-bed shot of approaching boots.
- He takes so long to get his guns that the cars are already driving away; the downhill Bronco run without power steering, lasting about a minute and a half, is a favorite part.
- Compared with efficient modern kills like John Wick's, the first victims are shot dozens of times, a reminder of how violent the film is.
- A visible booger in Arnold's nose appears when he is surrounded after the crash.
- The vehicle is probably a Chevy Blazer, not a Ford Bronco; the caravan could simply have stopped, and the plan fails anyway when he goes off the cliff and is captured.
- The second most rewatchable scene is the plane escape: he kills the man beside him within seconds, covers him with a blanket, says he is air sick before takeoff, and tells the attendant not to disturb his 'dead tired' friend on the 11-hour flight to Val Verde.
- He wanders into the cargo hold, hangs from the wheel as the plane takes off, drops into a marsh and checks his watch; surviving the fall is implausible and the falling dummy is obvious.
- As a nit, the escort should have put Matrix in the window seat; the Red Eye rule is to enclose the abductee.
- The mall scene is summarized as Arnold fighting about 25 mall cops, throwing a phone booth and swinging from the ceiling, with an implausibly large, all-stuntman security force.
- Swinging over the railings at the Houston Galleria at Christmas has always been tempting. — Shea Serrano
- Contestants on The Challenge usually fail to hold on in such stunts; the busy mid-80s mall, with a Swensen's ice cream shop, is a pleasure to see.
- The Arnold versus Bill Duke hotel-room brawl starts with them inches apart, has lame stage combat and self-mocking dialogue ('I eat Green Berets for breakfast'), and wedges in 10-out-of-10 gratuitous nudity from a couple filming themselves.
- As a nine-year-old with a tape, pausing on that nude moment took many tries.
- Driving a forklift into the weapons store and loading a cart like Supermarket Sweep includes scuba flippers he never uses, swimwear, and missile launchers from a store with no alarm.
- For the finale, the Bennett showdown is bizarre and Arnold goes shirtless under the vest; the garden-shed fight with axes, machetes and saw blades reaches 10-out-of-10 comedic violence, including a man left alive with his arm cut off.
- The Equalizer's hardware-store finale may have taken the idea from Commando.
- The garden shed is the pick; the 91-minute director's cut spends most of its extra minute there, adding a second saw-blade kill and another shot of the man missing his arm. — Kyle Brandt
- Some of Alyssa Milano's lines are saucier in the director's cut.
- The opening is the pick, the favorite opening of any Arnold action movie, thanks to the music and the men left to guard him dying immediately, plus the stay-downwind smell line. — Shea Serrano
- Another participant picks the plane escape, enjoying the giant man wandering the aisle and the line about the aisle seat.
