Last week I watched Killing Them Softly, which stars Brad Pitt as a hit man and it was about as enjoyable as some light water boarding. While I can’t get that hour-and-a-half of my life back, I did get a kick out of some firearms-related tidbits in the movie and one gun in particular absolutely cracked me up. Sometimes it’s annoying to recognize inconsistencies, mistakes, and Hollywood shortcuts, but sometimes it’s amusing. Right? . . .
And the award for shortest sawed-off shotgun of all time goes to… Killing Them Softly!
It almost killed me with laughter. There’s like negative 1/2″ of barrel on this SxS lulz-maker. The shells are actually sticking out the end! Love it. I hope whoever came up with this ingenious idea was cracking up the whole time.
Before that ridiculous shotty made its cinematic debut, Brad Pitt pulled out a Hi-Power in the completion of his first hit. The scene takes place at night, in the rain, and it was shot in super slow-mo. The cinematography and such was awesome, and you get to see the pistol cycling, frame-by-frame, from a few different angles.
But it was ejecting blanks! Like really, really obvious blanks with giant crimped noses. These screen grabs from IMFDB (the ones above are also from there) don’t even do justice to how in-your-face the crimped ends were.
I saw another movie in the past couple of months that also featured crimped blanks ejecting in slow-mo, but don’t remember what it was. I do recall [unsuccessfully] attempting to make my wife care that a flash hider was installed upside down while watching Skyfall in the theater:
So, what’s the verdict? Can you keep your mouth shut when you see something like this in a flick, or do you get sucked into the trap like I do and blurt out the myriad little errors and mistakes that almost always seem to make a cameo?
EDIT: somehow I forgot to include this! Best. Death. Scene. Ever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrnariwULfA
My wife and I make a game of it, actually…
As soon as I spot a gun error in a movie, the movie is dead to me.
Most prominent in my mind is Face Off. Every single time a gun is used you hear the unmistakable sound of racking a slide. So many times in fact, the guns would be empty by the time they use them.
In a reality TV show a guy had a pump shotgun and kept racking the slide! Nothing ever ejected, nothing ever loaded, just racking the slide.
My wife gets mad at me for this and errors in science that I point out. We don’t watch many movies together anymore 🙁
What about not commenting about it loudly?
Sometimes it’s fun and entertaining to notice (and comment on) mistakes in movies in general, including firearms ones; sometimes those same mistakes are extremely annoying.
It’s usually fun.
I find the ‘goofs’ section of IMDB more annoying than the movie mistakes themselves most of the time.
I watched some Bruce Willis movie last year that was supposed to be back in the thirties or forties.
Apparently, back then a 1911 pistol would hold somewhere between 30 and 50 rounds.
I want one of those, please or maybe two.
“Last Man Standing,” I take it.
I liked that movie better when it was called A Fist Full of Dollars.
It was even better when it was “Yojimbo.”
I liked it better when it was called Yojimbo.
@Rokurota: But did you really? I still liked Eastwood’s the best. You?
With a handle like Rokurota, can’t you tell I’m a Kurosawa fan? 🙂
I love Eastwood and Leone (The Good The Bad and The Ugly is one of my favorites), but Yojimbo has the edge on FOD. It has great action, dynamic black and white compositions and Toshiro Mifune. That it’s been quoted in everything from westerns to Star Wars is just icing on the cake.
Penkinpah always said, “I want to make Westerns like Kurosawa makes Westerns”.
I’m with brian and rok–I liked it better with Toshiro Mifune. But the movie did provide an instructive moment in media-2A relations. The guy who reviewed the movie for the Dallas Morning News thought that it was a ghastly anachronism to see a semi-auto pistol in a movie set in the 1930s. A subsequent letter to the editor pointed out the reviewer’s error, and noted, “No wonder the gun-control debate is so acrimonious, one side literally does not know what they are talking about.”
It’s a semiauto because, as we know, all modern pistols are full-auto Glocks. So by that logic, the S&W Model 2 in Yojimbo is a semiauto — because it’s semidangerous.
Last Man Standing. He did some cool dual gun mag changes in that flick, but his 1911s had almost unlimited mag capacity once he got shooting.
It not just the guns themselves but, for me, their effects. I would be the worst action movie director, ever. The actors would hate me and the movie would be boring, but realistic. My girlfirend will complain because I’m always commenting on these things.
My wife doesn’t like it, but I do it anyways.
I can’t help it, once you’re awake, it’s hard to go back to sheep.
Oh Yes. The first episode of The Walking Dead when the deputy is told to take the safety off, but it was a Glock! To add insult to injury he pressed down on the slide release. I laughed and almost when in to a blind rage.
Truly idiotic, usually like the lack of reality in the rest of the movie (or program, esp. crime dramas).
Most movies (and TV programs) kinda’ mimic the Nightly News and their Anchors that way. Or is it the other way around?
Yes, In “The Walking Dead” I also noticed that when they fired their weapons there was no kick.
There was also a scene where the Governor made an offhand shot at about 50m from an AR with no rear sight (front sight only). I for one was impressed.
Well considering the one shot head shot 50+yards off hip shot, by everyone, except like two people on the zom… walkers, yet thousands of rounds wasted in fights between live people standing around…
Yeah not looking at Walking Dead as accurate at all on firearms.
Darrel has no sights on his crossbow, but can head shot the hell out of a walker
My most memorable Walking Dead Gun error was when Angela shot herself with Rick’s revolver…and you could hear the empty casing bounce across the floor from behind the closed door.
I’ve gotta go back and look for that. 😐
My all time favorite movie firearms gaff is in the original XXX with Vin Diesel… he points his FN FNC at several bad guys and pulls the trigger only to hear a series of clicks because “he left the safety on”
If by “like” you mean “incessantly and gleefully call out even the slightest mistakes a film makes with its guns”, then yes, yes I do. Then again I do that with pretty much all minor holes in a movie and try to keep my mouth shut unless the rest of the audience is snarking as well.
Yes, because I have no choice. Until the day arises when they hand out Oscars for “Firearm Accuracy in Film”,there’s no point in even bothering.
Unless the director or producer is Michael Mann, don’t plan on anything being correct besides which way the guns pointing.
My nitpicks, offhand.
Skyfall- really, Bond? You shot a lock off a door in a subway with a .380 ACP on the first go? English mettalurgy must not be what it was.
The Transporter-The French gangsters must have had an in for discounted tracer ammo, even for their pistols.
My general favorite: bulletproof cars and furniture. Can anyone tell me which IKEA store sells Kevlar lined tables? Cause that Russian gangster at the start of Lord of War was lucky his table could stop 30+ 7.62×39 rounds.
“Unless the director or producer is Michael Mann, don’t plan on anything being correct besides which way the guns pointing.”
As boring as some of Mann’s films are (I almost fell asleep during Collateral), he does have some great gun scenes.
In Heat, ex SAS soldier and author of the Nick Stone series Andy McNab advised as far as guns and shooting go. I enjoyed Collateral, though, but then again, I can stay awake through the Lord of the Rings box set.
Heat featured quite a bit of racking an already loaded shotgun.
Doesn’t every movie feature at least one racking of an already loaded shotgun/pistol? (Let alone TV…?)
I remember seeing that (on the dvd bonus features?) about Heat. I think more movies are at least attempting to get the gun stuff right. I have seen similar featurettes on how cast members where trained in other movies.
I can stay awake for the LOTR trilogy as well, but I remember being in the theater for Collateral and just wondering “when will it end?”.
That’s weird, because I pretty much hated this Killing Them Softly movie and thought it was boring and generally horrible, but I love Collateral. One of my favorites, and I do own it. Loved everything about it — great character film, great acting, set, lighting, music choices… a favorite for sure.
Also: Man On Fire, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The Way of The Gun…
Just saw Man On Fire again. I did not know it was a remake of a film starring Scott Glenn. “A bullet always tells the truth.” OK, a cartridge tells the truth?
The 1981 movie “Thief” is a favorite of mine that Mann did as is the non-Mann 1981 Death Hunt. I do get annoyed by some of the firearm mistakes but some, like the endlessly loaded Tokarevs that Chow Yun Fat wields in Hard Boiled, just make me smile.
I was just happy to see a Tokarev in a non Russian movie in Hard Boiled. I found a good movie for gun handling was Shooter, it had realistic sniping scenes, very good disassembly scenes and Wahlberg was bad-ass.
I just watch and old Magnum P.I. were he was in an alley with two thugs roughly 20′ away, and took cover from their .38 behind an empty 55 gallon drum. I actually chuckled out loud on that one.
A 50 gallon steel drum would stop a short barreled .38 no problem.
Empty?
When I ventilate my burn barrels, a snubby .38 makes 5 entrance and 5 exit holes.
Growing up we use to shoot trash with .22LR, including 55 gallon drums. The .22LR at less than 30′ would easily penetrate the drum (would sometimes exit it as well). Of course that was from a rifle, and I have no idea what type of metal it was made from.
weird. I shot a hard drive out of a snubby and it just made a dent.
That’s the ticket – hide behind hard drives.
In The Rifleman Chuck Connors carried a custom 1892 Winchester while ranching in the 1870s.
No! Say it ain’t so? Love the Rifleman. That’s just cheesy good times.
The time frame was supposed to be 1870s-1880s. The Winchester had a set screw driven thru the big ring lever, once adjusted all he had to do was rack the lever and go bang bang bang. The screw could be turned out for normal use.
My childhood has been a lie.
The most obvious question, after reloading some shells then twirling it around why doesnt it fire? The set screw would have been still set to depress the trigger, so the twirling action would have resulted in a BANG!
The Hollywood excuse would be the set screw isnt explained to the viewing audience, youre supposed to think he can lever it and pull the trigger that fast, but you can see the screw clear as a bell in most scenes.
The set screw was quickly and easily adjusted so he could control his rate of fire and even “turn off” the feature. John Waynes ring lever had a similer set up.
Wayne had a slightly shorter butt stock on his so he could twirl it without hitting himself. Connors had been a ball player and was 2 inches taller than Wayne and had long arms. He could twirl the standard size 92 with no problem.
And in the Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, some of them are using Colt or Remington cartridge pistols that weren’t invented for another decade. Remember when Eli Wallach comes out of the desert and goes into the gun store, puts together a pistol and asks for cartridges? In later scenes, he has a cap and ball 1851 Colt–which Clint has supposedly unloaded. (You can see it in the final shootout). And at the hotel where Clint is staying, and the four Mexicans come to kill him, you see him cleaning out an 1851 Colt .38 cartridge conversion–a gun that did not exist until after the war (that model, with a solid cylinder rather than the Richards Mason conversion came out in 1870, as I remember.). At least Lee Van Cleef has a period 1959 Remington cap and ball .44–except when he is firing it, where they gave him a cartridge conversion, apparently so they could load it with blanks. But it still had the loading lever. Still one of my all time favorite movies.
In college (a long time ago) we would watch The Rifleman reruns every night. We decided to do a body count and taped a slip of paper on the TV to keep track. On the very first night, LM shot 12 men. We said holy cow WTF was that? Then the credits rolled and the director was Sam Peckinpah.
From Wiki
” His insistence on violent realism and complex characterizations and his refusal to sugarcoat the lessons he felt the Rifleman’s son needed to learn about life put him at odds with the show’s producers at Four Star”
And like almost every other western, he never carries it with a round in the chamber. Almost every time he needs it, he has to rack the lever.
That’s my biggest pet peeve about westerns and most modern cop shows. You’re a person who may need the gun very quickly, you you never carry a round in the chamber.
That’s one nice thing about Adam-12, since they had revolvers, there was nothing to rack to impress the audience.
It used to be just me pionting them out but now my wife has taken to the game.
Usually, she is the first to notice that the guy hasn’t reloaded in like 200 rounds of his 12 round mag.
I get a kick out of movies. You have revolvers that hold 20 to 30 shots, shotguns that have to be racked every few seconds, and 9mm’s that blow the bad guy back 10 feet. I’ve saw single action army colts fired double action and a pump shotgun that doesn’t have to be cocked.
Hollywood dolled up a bunch of large frame colt double action service revolvers, 1909 and 1917 models, so that they at least resembled the SAA. The reasoning that I’ve always heard was that the average actor wasn’t skilled enough to compently handle a single action revolver. The scene flows faster and the action happens at a quicker pace with the double action revolver.
Actors are not cowboys, cops, soldiers. A lot of them only touch a gun on the set of a movie.
The only actor I know that’s a gun guy, or at least not anti-gun, is Bruce Willis. When I found out that Sylvester Stallone was an anti, I binned Rambo 2 and 3. Not 1, that was good.
Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie are both gun-people.
http://www.nraila.org/news-issues/articles/2012/brad-pitt-is-pro-gun.aspx
I don’t know the accuracy of this and they don’t even explain it as far as I can see, but here’s a list that I just saw yesterday: http://www.washingtontimes.com/multimedia/collection/left-leaning-celebrities-who-are-pro-gun/
That is, I’m sure, NOT a complete list. But it’s also “left-leaning” celebrities that are pro-gun, not a list of celebrities of any general political stripe that are pro-gun (there are and have been plenty of celebs on the NRA board of directors)
Sean Penn used to be in that camp but apparently has completely changed his mind now thanks to his new wife. Captain Jack Sparrow is in the list above and I know his new wife, Amber Heard, is generally pro-gun as she has repeatedly talked about growing up in Texas driving muscle cars and owning and shooting guns (including handguns).
Whoopi Goldberg being pro-gun kind of surprises me.
But great, I’ve usually liked her material.
And, here’s another list, a few duplicates – a few others not yet discussed: Adam Baldwin, Gary Sinese, Alton Brown.
http://gunssavelives.net/blog/11-pro-gun-celebrities-yes-they-do-exist/#
She mentioned on The View once that she is an NRA member. Not sure if her alleged pro-gun stance is based on anything more than that.
I had no idea there were so many! Alec Baldwin surprised me. You wouldn’t have known it from the way he handled a gun in The Hunt for Red October. I knew Angelina Jolie had a knife collection, but not guns. I wonder what celebs concealed carry?
…and then turn around to tell us how bad guns are; so much so that they need to be regulated.
I like the one-shot kills with little or no aiming at all. In Hollyweird, the very act of squeezing a trigger is enough to kill one’s opponent.
Truly gun utopia.
Unless it is the hero getting shot. Then he can suffer grievous injury and survive. Like Bond. Shot, stabbed, sliced, diced and tortured, and comes back for more.
Matt Dillon-nine out of ten times when he was shot, it was an arm wound. Surprised he had anything left he could call an arm.
I like when the actor is so obviously looking at the other actor and the gun’s sights are clearly well below the actor’s line of sight. Like they’re holding the pistol up in front of them but they have this 20-yard stare that’s like a foot above the pistol haha… oh and of course they’re actually firing like this and hitting.
I don’t really have to try to look for them most of them anymore. They just kind of jump out at me. Most of my friends that I put these things out to go “meh”. 😐
Any time someone points a gun at another person on prime time cop/drama/crime shows, you’ll hear a bunch of clicks and clacks like they’re cocking the biggest hammer in the world. Doesn’t mater how the actual gun works, and often times it’s a Glock.
Sometimes it’ll make that clicking sound multiple times in the same scene as the gun is waved around. My wife picks up on this now.
Watch almost any cop show. They pull out their pistols and point them at the bad guys.
When the bad guys don’t comply (fast enough), THEY COCK THEIR GUNS. Ummm, yeah. And then I’ve noticed that in Criminal Minds SVU (or the spin offs) (my wife is a fan), almost every bad guy there is has a Beretta 92. Probably the same gun too.
That’s my personal peeve as well. Every time someone points a striker fired pistol and it makes a sound like a hammer being cocked. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
Sadly, having studied acting in college, having acted in some amateur films, and being interested in making movies in general – the actors often know better, having been trained by actual firearms experts. Then the director comes in and wants it done a different way because he likes the way it looks. Then the sound department ads weird sounds because they think it sounds cool. By the time you watch it 7 to 30 people have had a hand in making it as unauthentic as possible. (Those endless magazines? Yeah, we change magazines when they run out of blanks, same capacity as the real gun. It just gets edited out.)
I also hate HATE HATE when actors have horrible grips on pistols. Again, though, half the time it’s not the actor ignoring the training, it’s the director. “Hold it like this, it looks cooler!”
Yeah, the grip thing is an annoying one. Hate seeing some stone cold professional operator with a 2″ gap between the top of his/her hand and the top of the pistol’s grip. Sometimes it just looks so floppy and weird and you know if it actually fired it would kick back and flip out of their hand haha. It’s easy enough to forgive all sorts of tactical or advanced firearms handling stuff, but seriously, just teaching how to hold a pistol in your hand so it looks like you’ve actually fired one before in real life can’t be that dang hard.
I’m that guy. Ilove to point out the mistakes and plain bullshit that hollywood does with movies. Plus I’m a history buff. Don’t try to hide that half your men have the proper Martini Henry .450/577 and the other half are carrying magazineless long Lee Enfields and single loading .303 rounds into them(Zulu).
American soldiers boarding transports and carrying n0.4 Lee Enfields, Anzio. But when they get into the battle they’re carrying m1’s.
. . and Turkish soldiers in ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ fitted out with #1 Mk III Enfields and 1919 Browning machine guns?
Oh yeah. 55 days at Peking. American Marines carrying Long Lee Enfilds. Most older war movies have Japanese soldiers carrying 98 Mausers and Lugers. In Guadacanal Diary the Japanese had what looked like tri pod mounted Tommy guns for machine guns.
The list is endless and sometimes the movies are more fun if you’re just looking for the gun mistakes.
That annoys me too. When bad guys always use the same gun, too. In New Tricks, the Beretta 92FS is the norm.
I personally liked Hershal’s (I think that’s how you spell it) unlocking of the unlimited ammo perk for his shotgun in Walking Dead. Though I ill say Walking Dead in general is better at the gun accuracy than most.
I loved the scene at the prison where Rick used an AR without any sights to make a head shot on a moving zombie that was at least 100 yards away, and he was running. I at first thought the lack of sights was a mistake, but now I realize after watching this season’s final that its was just a representation of just how big of a bad ass he really is. 🙂
This is true.
Since it’s so rare, I love it when they get something *right*. I’m not a big Michael Mann film, but his movies always feature spot-on gun handling and an attention to matching guns to the characters. I also get a rush spotting not-oft-seen guns on screen.
When watching Burn Notice, Fi vertically one-handed pumps a shotgun with her right hand. All. The. Time.
My favorite was when they made a “motion activated booby trap” by sticking shotgun shells in the sockets of motion activated exterior lights. My wife loves the show, and can’t understand why I’m always snickering.
Don’t think I’ve gotten to that part yet. Don’t have cable so we just watch TV shows on netflix/hulu and we burned through Dexter pretty quick, on season 4 of Burn Notice….gonna have to find something new to watch soon.
It is also fun spotting them in “action” books – by authors whose only exposure to guns is Hollywood crap. The “Jack Reacher” novels are a great example – written by a Brit who lives in NYC, and has his ex-Army MP doing all sorts of impossible things with guns.
I stopped reading the “Jack Reacher” books because of that; they were fun and exciting, but it got to be too frustrating with his fantasy about guns and how they actually work.
I’m a huge fan of Jack Reacher. Have you seen the movie? It has a lot of sniper scenes, most notably with a scoped M14. The gun scenes weren’t actually to bad. The books are a quite bad for that. It always annoys me when books describe a gun as ‘a shotgun’. I like; ‘ a Remington 12-gauge shotgun, with…”.
There is a fine grey area between vague and too descriptive, I think Remington 12 gauge shotgun is as far as any writer should really go to describe a firearm.
One of the reasons I cannot stand a few of the new PA writers (like Rawles) is the gun erotica they put into their novels. Let me use my imagination and don’t shove a fanatical level description of a firearm into the story: Remington 870 Wingmaster in 12 gauge with an XS Big Dot night sight, tactical sling, Surefire flashlight fore end, and a Wilson Plus 2 magazine extension. Such lazy writing.
I saw it on a plane, wish I hadn’t. Total crap.
I’ve read all of the Jack Reacher books, and Lee Child (author) DID actually learn from his gun mistakes. I think he legitimately realized who his audience was and that he had to be accurate with that stuff. He did mention receiving a ridiculous amount of letters regarding Reacher disengaging the safety on his Glock, etc. That was SO dang painful for me to read. But he learned and even specifically mentioned in a later book that Glocks don’t have a safety and attempted to describe the H&K P7 in more detail than he should have. I think he eventually started caring and consulting an expert.
BTW — if you want a good book series with good firearms and tactics and no inaccuracies (at least in this regard), I highly recommend the Pike Logan series by Brad Taylor, an actual ex-operator in the operational operations spec-ops sense (Delta). http://bradtaylorbooks.com/
Er…some Glocks actually DO have a safety – do a Wiki look up.
Yeah, his later books avoid some of the more glaring gun errors. My favorite was where Reacher was looking at a revolver, and considering how it could be easily changed from right-handed to left-handed operation. Yeah, by throwing out the frame and putting the barrel on a frame specifically machined to be left-handed.
Thank you Jeremy S, that will be my reading for the next month!
Shotguns are the worst in movies. For every 2 rounds fired, 3 are ejected due to unnecessary slide-racking.
On a similar note, I started rooting for the bad guys in teen horror movies.
Kid: “The lights went out!”
Me: “Thanks Captain Obvious. Why don’t you go down to the basement alone stick your finger in the fuse box?”
“We’ve got to stick together!”…….then they scatter.
I pick them mentally but I chose not to annoy everyone else watching the movie who doesn’t care
One of the most consistent errors I see/hear is the phony sound of gunfire in movies. Shooting in confined spaces for example would render everyone involved virtually deaf and in real pain. Yet the movies make it seem like pop-pop-pop balloons going off.
Whenever I take a new shooter to a range for the first time, they’re always shocked at the sound of real gunfire.
Seriously. I can’t help but say something every time somebody shoots a revolver (or whatever) inside of a closed car and continues to act as though everything is normal. Good lord. He’d be deaf for days. Permanent hearing damage is just NOT a concern in movies.
I also couldn’t help but notice all the airsoft guns used for props in The Walking Dead. You could actually see the winders on the bottom of the mags when they stood the guns against the fence. lol
Really? I never noticed. That’s just lazy, given that you can buy insanely high quality mid-caps (no winding needed, and no wheel at the bottom) for $20-$30. Yes, I love airsoft.
Come on, you mean you didn’t think Gandolfini was good???
He was pretty awesome, actually. I got a kick out of his character.
I love seeing and talking about inaccuracies in video games. For years a lot of WW2 shooters wouldn’t let you reload the M1 Garand unless you emptied the entire thing.
I liked how everything ejected out the left side of the receiver in the original “counterstrike” game because they thought it was cool to animate the action cycling.
http://dwnloadwallpapers.com/wp-content/uploads/Counter-Strike-Wallpapers.jpg
Let’s not forget the infamous “Glock 7” from Die Hard 2. God forbid we forget the lives lost to that ceramic German death machine that’s undetectable by metal detectors and cost more than I make in a year.
You’d be surprised how much I make in a year.
As much as I enjoy (pro 2A) Tom Selleck, in the Jessie Stone series episode “Night Passage” there’s a scene where the bad guy has a revolver with a silencer..
http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0498360/goofs
Although tried in the past (OTs-38, Russia)…
http://www.modernfirearms.net/handguns/double-action-revolvers/rus/ots-3-silent-e.html
…the revolver in the movie wasn’t that….just an odd prop to be used…,
Tom Selleck’s pro 2A? Also, the Nagant silenced revolver.
Decidedly so.
If you ever watch the show Blue Bloods, they have an interesting episode where the city of New York is doing a gun buyback and Selleck’s character basically calls out the whole process as bull crap. He goes along with it of course, and it actually drives the plot forward on one of the stories, but stil it’s the thought that counts
Selleck got into a big on-screen squabble when he was being interviewed by gun grabber Rosie O’Donut, errr, O’Donnell. I think she got mad enough to throw him off the show.
The man has the patience of a saint:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtkgoGY4Cm4
Dude, Selleck has been on the NRA board of directors for a long time.
“I said I never had much use for one. Never said I didn’t know how to use it.”
Kind of says it all.
I howl when someone gets shot and they fly backwards 10 feet.
I also like it when they get some stuff right. The bar shoot out scene from inglorious bastards, for instance.
I do this with jet fighters (and some other airplanes as well). Also, on the opposite end of the spectrum, “The Way of the Gun” with B.DelToro not only got the guns right its one of the few movies where they also handle the guns 100% correctly
LOVE that movie. I actually wrote a paper on it in a college English class. It’s ridiculously quotable and has a lot of actual depth to it. The writer of the script described it as “a modern-day western where the cell phones don’t work.”
I do enjoy spotting gun errors, and identifying dressed up modern firearms in sci-fi movies.
The down side is when you have an action movie were you can tell some of the actors have never actually carried a firearm in real, and it ruins it for me. Its not too bad when its background characters, such as the SWAT guys in the original Die Hard. The other thing that now ruins a movie for me is a main character that doesn’t follow the firearm safety rules; I now have a hard time watching the Lethal Weapons movies as I cringe every time Mel Gibson runs down the street wildly firing his Berreta (sadly this has proven an accurate depiction of the LAPD’s gun handling skills).
Ah, a touch on one of my personal favorite.
A massive raid of the badguy HQ, dozens of fully kitted out SWAT ready to bust in the doors and clear out the place, and who is on point? The main character with his service pistol and a level 3 vest.
That of course has less to do with gun myths than police myths. Let’s not even start talking about CSI…
Heck yeah. Not just the firearms themselves, but the tactics. Who walks into a cult of psychopathic followers with a handgun to shoot the head instead of picking up the rifle? And, unsurprisingly, often the anti-gunners like Kevin Bacon don’t even know how to hold it.
I thought the same thing after watching the first couple episodes of the this seasons The Following. He should have traded in one or two of those handguns for an AR or shotgun (or even a hunting rifle). Heck, it seems like he’s come across enough firearms from the bad guys he should be well stocked in a wide variety of weapons (just look at the arsenal the twin’s were playing with at the mansion).
So what velocity would that buck shot have I wonder?
In which direction? 😉
It’s barely possible that if you were a few feet in front of that rig it would hurt. Your eardrums, anyway.
It’s also possible that if you were more than about 6 feet from the muzzle the spread of the shot would be so large you might not got hit, at least not intentionally.
My favorite is the sound a gun – any gun – makes simply by raising it to a firing position…that sound of slide-racking, even with revolvers. Sort of like the “shinnngg” a blade makes when drawn from a leather scabbard or waived about menacingly. But it in every movie I’ve seen for the past 30 or so years.
And also the sound of cocking the hammer on every single handgun every single time it’s being pointed at somebody, even if the gun has no hammer. And I hate that metallic sound of swords being unsheathed as well. Total nonsense.
The don’t “clang” either when struck against each other or a shield. The actual sound is surprisingly dull, more like a “clunk.” And then we have Troy–the bronze swords used by the Greeks could not stand edge to edge contact–they would bend. the short sword was a stabbing weapon, pretty much exclusively. Which the director found out quickly enough, and they had to convert to aluminum.
The Mask.
When Lt. Kellaway tells Jim Carey that Mrs. Peenman unloaded several rounds of “20 ought” buckshot.
Thats bothered me for nearly 20 years.
Hell yeah! My family never stop moaning at me never leaving the goofs alone.
I had a good laugh at the negative barrelled shotgun! I caught a supposedly rusted Beretta 92FS in New Tricks. Can a 92FS rust?
On the 92FS, yes, they can rust. If the finish is worn or abraded and or the pistol is subjected to very hostile environments. Sweat is a seriously corrosive substance to gun finishes and the effects of even a few days exposure to blood is astounding.
I haven’t met a service weapon that won’t and hasn’t rusted when subjected to someone who doesn’t know how to take care of it. I’ve seen a stainless revolver rusting from the internals out after being carried in a leather holster through the rain.
There’s one positive result to pervasive Hollywood ballistic buffoonery:
Everybody who’s ever been in a movie theatre recognizes the sound of a 12ga pumper being racked.
That makes it an effective deterrent, when all you need to do is scare the punks out of your driveway.
Provided the “punks” aren’t LEO looking for a perp in an unrelated matter.
I was watching the show arrow recently on netflix and they had multiple scenes in one episode where a character pointed a 1911 at another character multiple times with the hammer down.
I can top that: one of those shitty Feast movies featured a woman threatening a man with a Single Action Army that had its hammer down… and it went off and killed the guy.
Exactly!!! My pet peeve as well. Or the hero searching through a dark basement with his 1911 – hammer down… Any person who knew about firearms would laugh in their face and slap them down. I don’t think directors trust actors to wield 1911s with hammers back.
Back in the ’80s I had a friend who was confronted by a mugger on Hollywood Blvd. My friend was ex-Army and the mugger was just a stupid punk.
Anyway, this BG waves a 1911 in my friend’s face, then looks surprised when my friend wraps his fist around the back of the slide and disarms him. BG takes off running and the 1911, which had not been cocked, was turned over to LAPD.
Perhaps it’s a good thing that the BGs learn gun handling from the movies.
If it was a Para LDA or a Colt Double Eagle it could be ready to fire with the hammer down, though it’s more likely simply another movie mistake.
Previous girlfriends displayed minor annoyance with my inevitable pointing out of gun errors. Common refrains such as, “What are you planning on doing with that 1911 with its hammer down??”, or “It’s a Glock, stupid! Stop pressing all those controls and making clicking noises.”
However, when I learned that my current girlfriend finds my gun nerdery endearing, I knew I had a keeper. I’m a huge history nerd too, so that comes up a lot. Which, thankfully, she also finds endearing.
And maybe, some day, she’ll find “community property” endearing too.
Been there, done that.
And all I got was this lousy credit card debt.
A bright spot in an otherwise boring movie was how loud the shootout was at the beginning of “The Devil’s Own”
what was boring about, the devils own, was actually a pretty good movie,and tommy lees first starring role if i recall correctly as it preceeded, the fugitive in filming tho not release
My wife tolerates my nitpicking about firearms issues in entertainment, and she answers it right back with her own expertise. She is a chef, so in the middle of a movie I hear her muttering “look at that pan! They’ll never get a good sear on that salmon”
All the time.
I can’t stand it. To some degree it makes me enjoy the films even less.
Always full auto, full auto guns everywhere and purchasable from the store (same with anything NFA), guns akimbo, hip firing, no reloading, cocking hammers on SA guns, racking the shotgun multiple times before firing, low tang grips, suppressors are whisper quiet, guns can knock people off their feet, etc.
I like to think I have a fair amount of knowledge about firearms and how they work, plus I have my own knowledge from my career as it pertains to computers and video. I refrain from saying anything out loud, but meanwhile I have a friend who is a paramedic-firefighter and he has a bad habit about not being quiet whenever there is any sort of inaccuracy in either of his fields.
I think we all owe a hearty “Thank you” to Mythbusters for their work in this area and the beneficial effect it seems to have (sometimes) in making Hollywood pay more attention.
Being a motorcycle rider it has always been the engine sounds that I hate. A four stroke that sounds like a two stroke that has 300 gears as they are always shifting.
Bad guy rides off on a Honda 750/4 and it sounds like a Bultaco Pursang? Yeah, I feel your pain.
Yeah I feel you there. Plus other comments above and below about other professionals being bothered by inaccuracies in their fields (cooking, firefighting, etc etc etc). I’m a car guy and I do recall saying out loud on many movies something along the lines of, “how many freaking times is he going to shift!?!?!?!” or watching a 1/4 mile drag race in F&F or whatever movie and listening as they shift into 12th gear 1320 feet down the track (which apparently takes 10 seconds but takes 2 minutes of movie time) hahaha
I cringe when I see over-exaggerated ‘cup-n-saucer’ grip on a handgun. Saw it recently, but don’t recall in what; I had thought it was dead, but someone in hollyweird managed to resurrect it.
Similar gripe: support hand doing a wrist grab around the shooting hand’s wrist.
Another is over-obvious ‘jerk’ on trigger pull – to the degree that there is no way they could POSSIBLY hit a target 10 ft away, yet it’s depicted as super-awesome-almost-beyond-human accurate shot…gripe enhanced if this is done by a character that has never fired a gun before and shot with their eyes closed.
I find the more you know about any topic the more errors you’ll see in movies over the same topic. Goes with cars, guns, boats. Just about everything has an error because they couldn’t take a day worth of consulting someone that even knew anything about the topic.
Do I “like” pointing out things that a wrong in movies/TV? IDK, but I’m certainly COMPELLED to do so.
I undoubtedly would enjoy movies/TV a LOT more if I could ignore that stuff, or simply didn’t know as much about the subject matter as I do. I guess this is one of those “ignorance is bliss” things.
I like identifying guns and it depends who I’m with whether I bring inaccuracies up or not, as plenty of people have no interest in this.
As much as I enjoy that, I absolutely HATE glaring inaccuracies as shows a lack of attention to detail and spoils your suspension of disbelief when watching the movie. The worst one in my opinion is when someone is using a pistol or a shotgun, either actual shooting or just pointing it at bad guys, there is a break in the action for whatever reason, and then they rack the gun just to let everyone know they mean business and no bullets or shotgun shells pop out.
should we even talk about the movie “Wanted”, and how they can “curve the bullet”?
You’ve hurt me. I thought I’d buried the memories of that godforsaken movie where I can’t get at them. Why’d you have to do it? Why?
Don’t forget the 100ft long rifle with the 10-mile pinpoint accuracy.
That movie was trashy fun and I enjoyed it but yeah, the guns and physics in that movie were silly beyond belief. I especially loved the tacticool flintlock pistols being pointed about.
TV and movies. I watch a lot of cop shows, and its always good when they suck at identifying or handling firearms.
Luckily, my lady thinks it’s sexy being smart and observent, so she listens to my every last complaint.
It annoys me, especially when it is suppressors.
I remember in a movie the bad guy stops a bus in the middle of an intersection and shoots the driver with a silenced pistol. Because it is *Hurr Durr* silenced nobody bats an eyelash at it.
I’ve garnered such a strong reputation as the “gun guy” among my friends that now they won’t leave me alone during movies. I get all kinds of rapid-fire (no pun intended) questions about who’s carrying what gun, the history behind it, why they’re holding it a certain way, if the movie accurately depicts the function/ballistics of it, etc. It never ends, but it’s all good fun to me.
Just saw the new Captain America move last weekend. In a couple of scenes, these tactical shield troops are sporting AR/M4 rifles with front post sights and flat top upper receivers with no rear sight.
Seen the same thing on The Walking Dead a couple of times too.
Also in the new Captain ‘Murica: the semi auto sniper…musket.
My personal favorites are when there is a reference to taking the safety off of a Glock, and when they rack the slide when it would have already been loaded. The unlimited ammo without reloading is just expected nowadays, but the opening scene of “Red” was just ridiculous. Over 1k rounds fired form like four m4’s without reloading.
On the cover of Saving Private Ryan (60th D-Day anniversary edition) did anyone notice that the ammo can said “7.62”???? Im no expert but shouldn’t it have said Cal .30, or 30-06? I guess 30-06 could be called 7.62 (its 7.62×63) but it looked like a mistake to me.
I’m pretty sure you are right about this. Unless I am mistaken 7.62 was not used as a designation by the Allied Forces until it was adopted as a NATO caliber. Its presence on D-Day would seem anachronistic.
Dont bad mouth feast at least the first one. Buckets of corn syrup
Um. . . what?
I think it was some kind of statement abut legalizing marijuana.
He means that corn syrup was used in the formulation of fake blood, to achieve the right consistency and blood flow patterns…
Jason Mewes got his face ripped off. Any movie where Jason mewes gets mutilated is alright by me.
Being an IT guy and a gun guy I get double the annoyances or fun depending on how you look at it. Watch me hack the NSA with my electric toothbrush and fend off the bad guys with my bottomless 1911.
Computers are about the only thing that movies screw up more than guns, which is inexcusable given how pretty much everyone knows how to use computers–yet I notice in movies people use keyboards for everything. When I was a kid it made me feel like I was doing it wrong by using the mouse.
Are you saying I can’t hack by typing really fast on a keyboard (and even faster if I get my geeky female partner to ALSO type fast on the same keyboard at the same time)?
Filmmakers do seem to be trying a bit more than they used to, but things are still ‘iffy.’ During the ’40s and ’50s, it wasn’t unusual to see everybody with a cartridge revolver decades before they came into use, and everyone with an 1892 Winchester in the 1870s and 1880s, and every Indian with a brand-new 1873 or 1892 and unlimited ammunition, or the hero (‘High Noon’ and ‘Firecreek’ come to mind) switching from a Colt SA to a large-frame Colt DA revolver in mid-scene and back again.
I watched ‘True Grit’ 2010 last night, and during the ‘corn-dodger contest’ scene, Rooster Cogburn begins with his 1873, then it magically becomes Mattie’s Dragoon, then becomes an 1873 again. He also, at the end of the river-crossing scene, uncocks his 1873 by letting the hammer SLAM fully down on what would be a loaded chamber with the trigger held full back–that normally would’ve been LOUD. Rooster claims that his two saddle pistols are ‘Navy 6s’, but when he pulls them for the ‘charge’ scene they appear to be Dragoons, and the barrel wedge on at least one is about to fall out.
On the other hand, Ned Pepper’s revolver is an 1875 Remington (which he discharges alongside his EAR at one point), and Harold is carrying an S&W Schofield-not too shabby, really.
Of course, everybody in film and TV is still running the slides on modern auto pistols before getting off a shot, and the heroes are still able to hit a bad guy at 100 yards off-hand with a DA pistol that never has its hammer shown cocked after the first shot and never ejects an empty case, while the bad guys are missing at 100 feet with fully-automatic rifles. Yes, and bullets still won’t punch through automotive sheet-metal–they just sparkle.
Unfortunately, knowledge has ruined a lot of those old Westerns for me–invariably set in the 1860’s, invariably everyone armed with 1873 models.
From The Magnificent Seven movie:
(Britt has just shot a fleeing bandit off his horse)
Chico: Ah, that was the greatest shot I’ve ever seen.
Britt: The worst! I was aiming at the horse.
My female counterpart and I go back and forth like Siskell and Ebert about the guns, vehicles, aircraft and security systems.
Donteven get her started on language or mythology, or me on information technology or history…
I still get annoyed by the cartridges on the gun belts in the spaghetti westerns while the gun in the holster was cap n ball, right down to the nipples on the back of the cylinder for the caps. I’mna pretty sure cartridge conversions of cap n ball pistols had to use a different cylinder.
OTOH I give props to Kelly’s Heroes for finding some actual Shermans courtesy of the Yugoslav army. Also making the effort to kitbash T(iger)-34’s. Oddball was a tanker’s tanker.
One of the issues that always bugs me is that the equipment/ammo pouches do not match the weapon in the actor’s hands. In the 1980s, everyone carrying an Uzi or MP5 had M16 ammo pouches. And I will allow you to tuck one extra magazine in your back pocket, Axel Foley. But eventually you are out of places to put all of the magazines. The shootout in Beverly Hills Cop almost ruined a fun movie. Even when they have a character pause to reload, where the hell did all of those extra magazines come from. And don’t get me started on the Predator fire team. Wrong ammo pouches and I am quite certain they could not have possibly carried the amount of bullets fired from just the minigun much less the combined round count.
Note to Hollywood, it is not magical when you get simple things really wrong.
And on the same note, were do all of the hand grenades, Claymore mines, and satchel charges hide? I see soldiers moving in wearing some LBEs but no large pouches or rucksacks. Then, suddenly the leader says “let’s make a stand” and all of the underlings start setting out Claymore mines, flares, whatnot. First, that stuff is heavy. I always noted the weight of ordance the first time I had to pick it up. Your super troopers would not like it one bit if they had to physically carry the equivalent weight. And let’s make it fun by throwing on some plate carriers. Second, in the world of make-believe, let’s assume your DeltaParaScubaRangers are actually carrying the weight. In what? No rucksacks. Hell, not even a buttpack.
And secondly, what’s with all the guys firing shoulder-launched weapons/RPGs who NEVER check their back-blast area?
(This was intended to wind up below my other comment.)
Which brings up one of my pet peeves – the Good Guy running through the scene with is pistol and two spare mags, gunning down Bad Guys left and right, and he NEVER stops to pick up dropped weapons, spare ammo, or even grenades from the dead or wounded guys.
That’s one of my Walking Dead pet peeves. No one ever stops to search bodies or pick up brass for reloading. Where ARE they getting all that ammo? When they “bug out”, no one thinks to grab the loading press?
If I was in the Walking dead I would have a bag to pick up various things. The one that annoyed me the most, they are in a house, in the bathroom and he ignores a roll of nice soft toilet paper. That would certainly be a “keeper”.
My wife asked me to stop noticing (or at least voicing the complaint) that the good guy with a pistol never stopped to pick up the bad guys’ assault rifle. If all of the evil henchmen are using the same rifle, then each time you kill one you should take his ammo.
Scarlett Johansson shooting 2 semi autos like they were cap guns in Avengers & Captain America 2(BTW the best MOVIE ever made).
Don’t know about best movie ever, but damn good. That FNX Tactical looked huge in Emily Van Camp’s petite hand.
And I’ll take Hayley Atwell with her PPK sharpshooting any day. (She rocked a good Thompson, as well).
My favorite–literally–error is one I only heard about, supposedly one of the cops on one of those CSI shows elevated my plain-Jane 9×18 P-64 to armor-piercing status: “A P-64. It’s a gangster gun, can put a bullet all the way through a truck…” or something like that.
And while I do not remember the movie, I recall some time a back the Good Guys going on about “cop killer” armor piercing bullets and a scene where the Bad Guy with a full-auto MP-5 fired up a magazine full and they effortlessly made nice clean holes through the front bucket of a back hoe. That was hilarious.
It was Lethal Weapon 3.
I remember watching Sons of Anarchy and one of the characters busts into a house with what looked like a sawed off Mossy HS12 O/U. He shoots and kills one guy, then pumps and aims at other people in the room. I just scratched my head. My wife turns as says “did he just pump a double barrel shotgun?”
Japanese anime: guns so badass they give a middle finger to physics.
Voila! The ZF-1.
It’s light. Handle’s adjustable for easy carrying, good for righties and lefties. Breaks down into four parts, undetectable by x-ray, ideal for quick, discreet interventions. A word on firepower. Titanium recharger, three thousand round clip with bursts of three to three hundred, and with the Replay button…
+1 on the Fifth Element reference.
not just anime. _all_ japanese movies.
but that’s what happens when handguns are entirely banned, and long guns are extremely restricted virtually to only shotguns. the only access your average japanese citizen has to anything even remotely firearm related is airsoft. which explains the bizarre selection of firearms you see in japanese movies. everything they have exposure to is only airsoft models, mostly the tokyo marui catalogue.
since they have never fired or had exposure to a real firearm, the effects and handling are completely off the wall and make even the most insane hollywood firearm nonsense look tame.
Heat has the single best sustained firefight, but for consistent proper gun handling Miami Vice was even better. Good muzzle discipline and trigger discipline (generally) throughout, even some actual tactics being employed at the end shootout. A few miracle shots here and there, but it still a movie after all.
Did anyone see the movie Assassins with Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Bandares and Julianne Moore? There is a scene where Julianne Moore cocks the hammer on a Ruger MkII. I think I said “W T F?” a little too loud in the theatre.
I was watching an amazingly bad zombie moviethe other day with my sons. In it one of the female main characters discovers an abandoned .50 cal machine gun at a military check point. She loads it onto a shopping cart, and later fires it while it’s still in the cart. The whole time she is firing it not once did the cart move, but neither did the ammo belt. Even my eight year old could not buy the 120 lbs women firing such a heavy weapon fully automatic and on wheels.
I think I’ve seen that very same movie. Fire an M2 from a shopping cart? How the heck did she even get it into the shopping cart (it’s an unwieldy 85lbs unloaded, adding 100 rnds ups the weight by an additional 35lbs)?
Lessee – a movie about mysteriously reanimated rotting corpses who eat brains, and the woman manhandling the machine gun is the implausible part? 😉
You make allowances for the plot… ignoring biology is bad enough, do we also have to abandon physics?
Pick out ALMOST any movie with guns and you’ll find a “magazine of holding” and when the trigger is pulled (TWD: Herschel) there is an endless supply of ammo. Not to mention in all of these movies, they ALMOST ALWAYS find fully automatic weapons just laying around to be taken.
I don’t like spotting gun errors in movies. Instead, I look for the gun stuff they get right. It’s much more challenging. You can watch a hundred movies and not find a single damn thing.
Well…They pull the trigger and the gun goes “BLAM”, that had to count for something.
The advertisements for National Geographic’s Alaska State Trooper showed a guy walking around a car in a fake uniform racking the slide on a plastic Airsoft shotgun. I tried finding it on youtube but couldn’t. It used to bug me….
Was watching one of the Austin Powers movies that is supposed to be in the early 70’s and they bust in a door and have m-4’s
And how about the nipple-mounted dual machine guns with unlimited ammo?
No, that seems legit.
As usual, a hammer cocking click on a striker fired or after several shots are fired, the hammer should already be back.
Racking, cocking and pumping are the universal language of Don’t F with me. Regardless of weapon type, type or action.
When my kids were little, they learned to answer “the beatles” to “Who’s singing this song” on the radio,
While watching a movie, my wife has learned to answer “1911” or “92FS” when asked “what kind of gun is that”. It seems that the Beretta is the goto gun and stocked by the movie prop rental shops,
BTW, my wife is a nurse, so she can shit can the medical stuff. Our favorite is the nasal cunnula (nose hose) that signals to you than “this guy is in bad shape”. The patient should actually be on respirator and have it breathing for him.
Yeah, guilty. Love watching people threaten someone with a 1911 with the hammer down and safety on. That shit gets me every time haha.
On the plus side too, I might have annoyed my girlfriend at first but now she calls them out when she sees them, or if she’s unsure why I called something out she asks about it. So now I got that goin’ for me…
You should get your 1911 looked at, if you can activate the safety when the hammer is down – something is wrong there, man, I’m just saying 😉
The worst movie gun faux-pas is the constant pistol shooting millimeters from people’s ears and no one ever has any problem conversing at whisper levels right after having their eardrums shredded. Most recent offender: The Purge. 3/10. Would not recommend.
On Avatar, the Colonel has his drop holster set up for cross draw.
My favorite case is one where real life imitates the movies …
Scene: big city Veterans Administration hospital.
What: my partner (whose husband is a deputy in the town we live and work in) noticed that the VA cops guns aren’t loaded. They don’t even have a magazine in the well. I can’t swear to it, but I don’t even think I’ve seen a magazine in their possession! If we saw this in the movies, we’d be laughing at it … assuming my wife and I watched movies 🙂
It isn’t true for every VA hospital, because the VA cops in the (smaller one) in our town have loaded guns.
I watch for them all the time, some of them are quite hilarious. Just a couple of weeks ago on “The Good Wife” they had the defendant steal the court officers glock then randomly shoot up the court room. By the end he had run that thing dry and was attempting to kill himself with it. Two things: 1) The slide did not lock to the rear on the last round (possibly forgivable), 2 he had the glock under his chin repeatedly pulling the trigger with an audible click each time and the trigger resetting each time he let it out. I was unaware that glocks work that way my glock 20 must be defective then *Sarcasm*.
Cartoons were\ are horrible with guns (with a few exceptions… Archer gets it mostly right after the first season). Almost anytime someone has a shotgun it will be pump-action, double barreled with an unlimited magazine (only needs to be pumped once, for effect!)
Archer had a “click” out of ammo moment, where the slide still cycled.
They are improving, though.
They tend to not have the slidelock after firing the last round, too…
The movie that most recently actually impressed me by how well they portrayed firearms and how correctly they were handled was the Jack Reacher movie with Tom Cruise. Check it out sometime, it is quite good and the gun handling in it is pretty impressive.
about hitting a perp in the chest and knocking him back a few feet, i have seen this infact in demonstration of kevlar vest backed up with ceramic plates individual took a .40 ca hollow point square in the chest from 50 feet damn near knocked him head over heels definitely took him off his feet and he landed at least 6 feet back muzzle velocity and impact 1200 fps 475 psi with 210 gr round id like to see any one stand straight up and take 475 impact in the chest at close to 1200 fps
Cool story, Bro.
475psi is about 68400ft-lbs, by the way. Hard to understand using pressure to measure kinetic energy, but it’s all good. Don’t think that you could do it with only 210 grains, though–more like 21396 grains, or some 3 pounds. . . .40 calibre bullet weighing 21396 grains at 1200fps equals 68401ft-lbs. Of course, if you hit somebody with the energy equivalent to that produced by an M242 25mm chain-gun round at the muzzle, they just MIGHT be knocked back a few feet–at the same time the guy firing the thing got knocked back a few feet as well, Mr. Newton’s rules being what they are and all (“Equal and opposite reaction,” or something like that).
I, of course, once knew a guy who had a best friend whose mother’s twin brother’s father was hit in the pinkie with a .45 and could never have children a result. Turned him into a newt, it seems. He got better. I remember that they used sheep’s bladders to cure him.
Even the Segreant York movie got it wrong, but that was on technical grounds – they had no method of running a blank firing .45 at the time, so a Luger was substituted, without gravely injuring the plot. But in real life it was a Colt what done the job, and the Luger holding Germans put their hands up.
Some gun errors don’t annoy me. Austin Powers is a fun movie, who cares if the guns not correct. James Bond is a super Spy, he can make 100 yard shots with his PPK. Aliens do not exist, you can use make believe guns.
But serious action movies should not have pump action side by side shotguns. wrong magazines etc.
It is possible that a year after a Zombie outbreak the only AR may not have a rear sight.
The thing that annoys me is people cocking their handgun before a gun fight, we all carry loaded.
Other movie errors that annoy me are car tires screeching on gravel and incorrect CPR carried out by Doctors.
An episode of Good Wife had a box-opening scene of a brand new pistol with a made-up manufacturer name and it came with a silencer but the barrel wasn’t threaded.
In defense of the movie, it was pointed out by the robber’s partner how stupid it was to saw the barrels off that short.
That makes sense. It doesn’t seem like something the filmers would accidentally do.
I remember the Vegas TV show with James Caan. A guy hidden in Caan’s vehicle puts a 1911 to his head and you hear cocking noise. A close up then shows gun at Caan’s head and it is not cocked.
1st Season 24, not a gun error however, the way Jack Bauer ‘persuaded’ this woman to help him by racking the slide of his semi-auto and yelling at her. what a waste of pistol cartridges.
Yes, and my family hates me for it.
I love it when the good guys have someone at gunpoint and the bad guy moves and you hear the action cycle …but you never see them cycle the weapon …tears of laughter. Its like they cannot make their weapons make noise at will .
I think one of my favorites applies to the Bundy ranch thing and movie mistakes at the same time. “Outlaw Josey Wales”. Person in the wrong that is also in the right at the same time even know two Colts hold 14+ rounds.
We’ll be watching cop shows on TV and my wife will say: “see that, see that?” I know that means somebody got swept. She has an eagle eye for that stuff. Usually it’s good guys sweeping each other or even better, sweeping the kidnapping victim they are saving. The one I always see is the scene they like to repeat where two guys face off, each pointing a 1911 at the other or possibly with the good guy with a gun and a gun near the bad guy (but bad guy has to reach for it). The good guy with his 1911 (hammer down) now thumb cocks the hammer back with the click-click. I guess this is supposed to mean that the gun can fire now (? – did it have a round but the hammer was down?), or possibly that it loaded the bullet (? – a new kind of DA), or maybe that the gun just went into overdrive mode where a nuclear tipped armor piercing baby-seeking hollow point round was somehow designated as the bullet that will now shoot. Of course, when he thumb cocks the 1911, my wife and I look at each other and try to think of funny things to say. It happens so often that we’ve run out now but sometimes we would get concerned that maybe the gun has hammer follow issues and the good guy needs to get that looked at before he puts a round into the other good guy he was sweeping when he originally racked the slide. “He needs to go see Otto about that hammer follow.”
We rarely go see movies any more. When you have a technical background, today’s movies are just horrible to watch.
Computer/sci-fi movies are some of the worst. The way that hackers supposedly get into systems is laughable.
Then there’s what I call “Movie Land Physics” where people go flying through the air because they were hit with a shotgun blast. Oddly enough, the little girl who just fired the shotgun isn’t moving an inch.
There have been times when the wife dragged me to a movie, and at the end she’d ask “What did you think?” and I’d just give her “the look” that says “Would you like me to really enumerate how many impossible feats of Movie Land Physics we just saw?”
This is why I like completely animated films now. Despicable Me (1 and 2) I thought were very funny. The whole premise of an army of minions that look like Twinkies in Carhartt bibs is enough to make me chuckle every time.
I can’t help but point them out. Some of these have been mentioned, but the ones that I hate the most, are when someone shoots a gun , sometimes multiple times, inside a car, and doesn’t suffer any hearing loss at all.
The other one I really hate is when a revolver is pointing at the screen, and you can clearly see the damn thing is empty!
Speaking of revolvers, in my formative years, I grew up believing in silenced revolvers (S&Ws and Colts) and that Jack Lord could indeed take a man down from a mountaintop with a 2″ snubby.
And all the shooting caseless ammo (even in old Westerns because there is never any brass ejecting. I gotta get me one of those brassless lever actions.
But sometimes, the gun handling is so bad, I actually turn off the movie. I was watching some “B” flick called “Revenge” the other night, and this guy is learning to shoot for the first time. He’s holding a S&W revolver in a death grip, but it won’t fire. So the girl (his instructor) tells him “You have to pull the hammer back first!”
I found something else to watch.
I see it all the time on TV when my wife watches Bones, 24, NCIS, PSYCH, and especially CSI whatever franchise:
– teacup grips x one million times
– bad guys getting shot and dies like a light switch was turned OFF
– good guys taking forever to die even after taking a lot of shots
– jerking the trigger with the finger all the waaaay in while landing single-hole groups at a police firing range
– obviously looking at the target, not at the front sights
– compact pistols shooting around 20x w/o changing mags
– macho room-clearing while sweeping your guns on friendlies
– guns firing with no recoil (Criminal Minds) and using computer-animated flashe
– bad guys getting knocked back with one shot
– people pulling back the hammer on a 1911 to show that “they mean business”
I’ve actually shot looking at the target and not at my sights, holding my pistol between waist and chest height. Worked pretty good, on a timed drill I was one of the few guys that hit both side targets and put more than on hot in the middle target before it turned side-on.
That’s a lot of comments. Anyway, it’s been awhile, but if I recall correctly, Mr. And Mrs. Smith had a seen with the Glock “18’s” and blanks. Also, there was something about the recoil on them that I can’t specifically recall. Expendables also.
I like NCIS and NCIS LA but LL Cool J had me on the verge of not watching that show again. They were in a fire fight with some bad guys and they were shooting full auto AR’s but when they did a close up on Agent Hanna (Ladies love Cool J) he was pulling the trigger very rapidly. I was like just hold it down buddy.
Well, I am an occasional contributer to IMFDB, so yes, I notice errors. I actually don’t like it, since it ruins the immersion, but I just can’t help it.
When I watched Ironman 3 in the theater, I was paying attention to Tony Stark’s lack of hand gun knowledge. As he and Rhodes were assaulting the Shipping Dock, Rhodes hands Tony a pistol. Tony then shows and empty “clip” and it is an airsoft magazine. Not even a dummy resin magazine.
In the Bourne Identity, Clive Owen shoots at Matt Damon with a suppressed SIG 551. Then he jumps up and pulls the “suppressor” off, revealing the barrel underneath what was clearly just a fake suppressor looking sleeve.
Also the show Castle, I caught the first two minutes of an episode once. Then a character with a shotgun said something like “loaded with hollow points so he means business.” I changed the channel. I’m sure hollow point slugs do exist, but c’mon.
There are actually lots of hollow point slugs and arguably since these expand more quickly and deposit more energy over a shorter penetration they are even more suited to defensive use than to hunting. Then again, the raw power of a shotgun suggests that anyone who brought one to the fight was pretty serious in the first place.
I cringe every time I watch a movie or show where the mere act of AIMING a gun brings the sound of a cocking hammer. Now every time my wife and I are watching something together and that happens, she says “I know, I know” before I can say anything…
Two from the Sopranos (which generally was pretty good about portraying guns accurately):
1. When Christopher Moltisanti gets shot coming out of a diner and returns fire the casings lying all around him on the ground are blatantly crimped blank casings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mVv7Krp5Lg
2. When Vito kills Jackie Jr. he does so with some gun that I’m pretty sure isn’t a real gun and is just some prop gun. At any rate, it doesn’t appear to cycle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQjtvBpUSF4
I saw killing them softly and loved it. I didn’t realize it was a hi power in the “hit” scene. When I saw the bullets i thought it was maybe .357 sig. I’ve never scene them in real life, but the shells looked like how i thought they might. good catch.
Jaws . 9 shots from an M1 Garand .
Well… one in the chamber?
(I’m kidding)
When I see someone pointing a 1911 or other single action pistol at someone else with the hammer clearly down I can’t help but say “Who does he expect to be shooting with the hammer down like that!” I’ve caught this one a few times in supernatural.
The Matrix series of movies has to have the most firearms mistakes I have ever seen. My favorite movie weapon mistake was Rambo where he fired a L.A.W. from inside a Huey helicopter with rescued P.O.W.’s seated behind him and no one was burned by the flame from the rocket.
The technica errors are fun but the legal errors are anoying.” You have x gun regisered to you” or worse the known felon who is a legal gun owner, that was on bones a few weeks ago.
Gun errors are to you like, like lens flare is to me. Now that I’ve seen lens flare, I can’t unsee it, and it’s very distracting whenever it’s in a movie now.
I don’t notice most mistakes, but I do enjoy testing my knowledge and seeing if I know what they’re using.
In the movie “logan” the main character pulls the bullets out of his body then throws the empty brass in the sink
I just enjoy the show, until someone says, “over and out”.
While we’re on stupidity in movies and TV, every time they show someone “safe cracking,” the dial makes all kinds of clicking sounds and they can hear it when the wheels are in the right position. The safe is open in (sometimes) a matter of seconds. None of that is possible. The wheels don’t make noise, and you can’t hear them when they are in the right position.
Inaccuracies in the movies? At least they’re consistent with the rest of the anti-gun crowd. If they ever did succeed in getting guns banned what would they do? Without gun violence both TV and the film industry would dry up and blow away.
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