I love movies, and I especially love movies that involve firearms. It’s a natural combination of two things I enjoy. If Michael Mann releases an action flick, you can bet your last dollar I’ll be seeing it in theaters and have the Director’s Cut Blu-Ray. As much as I love movies and guns, I don’t get wrapped around the axle when movies get guns wrong. In fact, it’s often humorous. Today, we are going to dissect some of Hollywood’s most nonsensical movie guns.
Movie Guns Where Ridiculous and Awesome Collide
I avoided a lot of fantasy-style movies. I’m not going to dissect the Star Wars guns because, well, it’s Star Wars, and I don’t know how lasers work. Everything I’ll dissect will be a real gun firing a real cartridge. Let’s dig into it.
Escape from New York: MAC-10
Snake Plissken is so damn cool. The voice, the eye patch, the attitude, he’s just so over the top and campy, it’s hard not to be charmed. He’s an antihero that’s tough not to love, and he surfed into our hearts in 1981 in Escape From New York. Plissken, a hardened convict and former commando, is tasked with rescuing the President from the penal colony of Manhattan.
Before going in, he’s armed with a MAC-10 that’s trying its best to be somewhat futuristic. It’s as futuristic as 1997 can get! The MAC-10 is a classic submachine gun bordering on a machine pistol. It’s a .45 ACP gun and was commonly paired with the Sionics suppressors. That’s the case here, but other than the can, the gun doesn’t make much sense.
For one, they chopped the stock off, which is silly since it doesn’t add all that much bulk. To make chopping the stock even worse, they handed a magnified optic to the gun. To take it a step further into nonsensical Hollywood guns, they mounted the scope to the suppressor. Even if it’s a long eye relief scope, mounting it to the suppressor is ridiculous.
First, it’s not going to be stable, indexing will be a mess, and suppressors get absurdly hot. It’s silly and over the top, but fitting of the character. This same configuration makes a cameo appearance in The Walking Dead a few decades later.
South Central: M14 and Revolvers With Potato Suppressors
South Central is a 1992 independent film that’s an adaptation of a novel called The Original South Central L.A. Crips. It was a movie that received a ton of praise for its story, acting, and realism. I can’t speak for its realism in terms of South Central in the 80s, gang lifestyles, etc, but I can say its use of potatoes is ridiculous. These are less movie guns and more movie suppressors.
The film portrays some gang violence, and in more than one scene, our enterprising criminals equip their firearms with potatoes that act as suppressors. Yep, potatoes, and it works, at least in the film. The suppressors reduce gunshots from BOOM to pew. Suppressors work by slowing down and cooling gas; a potato cannot do that.
They equip revolvers with potatoes, which is utterly ridiculous. Even if a potato works as a suppressor, it wouldn’t work on a revolver. The gap between the cylinder and the barrel emits plenty of blast that makes suppressing most revolvers impossible. However, some, like the Nagant revolver, can be suppressed.
They even equip an M14 with a potato suppressor, which is hilariously ridiculous. It’s firing a supersonic round that’s quite powerful. A .38 Special would turn potatoes into mashed potatoes, and I can’t imagine what an M14 would do to a potato at the end of the barrel.
Ant-Man: Hammer-Fired Glock
Ant-Man, the superhero whose power varies widely depending on what’s convenient to the writers, can wield and control ants. I like the movie; it’s silly, fun, and Paul Rudd is always great. A scene near the end has Ant-Man and his army of ants invading a tech bro’s office to stop him from doing whatever big bad thing he’s planning.
Ant-Man fights his way through an army of nameless bad guys and uses ants in creative ways. One such way is having dozens of ants cling to a handgun and get between the hammer and the firing pin. This renders the bad guy’s gun useless, and in reality, could work. If you can stop the hammer from dropping, the gun can’t fire.
However, the camera zooms out, and the gun of choice is a Glock 17. Keen eyes will recognize that the Glock is not a hammer-fired gun. It’s a striker-fired gun. There is no external hammer, and the gun releases a striker that fires the gun. Ants would have a lot harder time jamming a striker-fired gun, so if you’re an Ant-Man villain, jot that down.
What’s crazy is that there are dozens of movie guns that could have made this an accurate portrayal. We have guns from SIG, Beretta, and even some old S&Ws that could have filled the slot. It’s an easily avoidable error, but if they had avoided it, I couldn’t have made my wife sigh while pointing it out.
The Tomorrow War: The AR Abomination
Alright, so time travelers come back to the past to recruit you to fight a war in the future. Humanity is losing, and losing badly. The invaders are ravenous beasts that can’t be negotiated with, can’t be reasoned with, and they are winning. The aliens are massive animals that fall into the dangerous game category. If I tell you this, what gun are you taking to fight them?
Maybe an AR-10? Hell, the SIG M7 seems like a great choice for killing big, armored beasts. Maybe even a semi-auto rifle chambering a futuristic big-game cartridge. Hell, I’d settle for a Browning BAR, the original WWII BAR in .30-06. Well, how about an AR-15 with a 7.5-inch barrel?
What do you mean? An AR-15 that’s best used in close-quarters combat, firing a fairly small round that requires velocity to kill, isn’t a good idea? A 7.5-inch barrel doesn’t render a 5.56 round useless, but against giant, seemingly thick-skinned alien beasts, it’s less than optimal.
Don’t worry, we’ve also equipped the rifle with Hera Furniture, ACOGs, RMRs, and Inforce lights. Wait, no, that doesn’t make me feel better at all! The guns are a futuristic take on the AR, but aren’t so dressed up that they don’t look like an AR. This is why it doesn’t violate my no sci-fi movie guns rule for this article. At least the guy with the Beretta 1301 makes a little sense.
Napoleon: Scoped Baker Rifle
I like Ridley Scott movies, but Napoleon let me down. I didn’t care for the film and would rather watch Gladiator 2. Maybe the 4-hour Director’s cut version will be better, most Ridley Scott director’s cuts are, but I’m not counting on it. I’m no historian, but a leading historian in Napoleonic studies, Patrice Gueniffey, wasn’t a fan.
Again, I’m no historian, but I know a little about guns, even guns from Napoleon’s era. In the Battle of Waterloo, we see a British sharpshooter armed with a Baker rifle, which is accurate. Both historically and in the gun’s ability to make hits. The Brits learned from the American Revolution that rifled long arms were valuable tools to engage their enemy.
The Baker rifle was fielded by sharpshooters to engage the enemy at longer ranges and to disrupt the command and control elements of a military unit. Where the Napoleon film goes wrong is showing a scoped Baker rifle in 1815. The Brits weren’t issuing scopes with the Baker rifle, and we wouldn’t see practical rifle optics until about 1830.
Best yet, the scope isn’t a scope, it’s a spyglass. There is no reticle, no adjustment method, or anything that would make it useful. It’s also mounted with what appears to be burlap that’s wrapped around the gun and the spyglass. That’s not exactly a well-mounted scope. It’s silly, but honestly, the film is kind of silly.
Bad Movie Guns Are Great
There is a horseshoe-shaped scale of greatness to movie guns. On one extreme side, we have great movie guns. Movies like Heat and Collateral are on that extreme side. In the middle, we have the boring films that don’t do anything bad or anything great. On the other extreme side, we have the guns we listed today. Their designs are hilarious and entertaining. The point of a movie is to be entertaining, so I prefer bad movie guns to boring movie guns.
