Sunday, April 26, 2009

Movie Guns XXXVI

I'm way late this time, but it's not completely my fault. I would blame Verizon, Toshiba, and then me, in that order.

Oh well, you're here now, so you might as well take a few minutes to give it a read.

Before I get going, I'd like to say that I have some cleaning up to do in about half of my Movie Guns posts as I have received so many comments. GM45 from IMFDB picks out many of my errors, and I just haven't gotten around to fixing everything. Sorry about that. On top of these posts I try to run the blog as well, and since I have two little kids at home my time just isn't what it used to be. Things are getting better though, and I will try to get down to addressing your corrections this week. I appreciate the scrutiny though, and I hope it keeps up.

This Movie Guns is a request from awhile ago, and I'm just getting around to it because I couldn't find the movie until recently. The film is called Narc, and it stars Ray Liotta as Detroit police detective Henry Oak, and Jason Patric as detective Nick Tellis.

The movie starts out with Tellis chasing a crack head through a rural area, and during chase the crackhead stabs a guy in the neck with a syringe:


Tellis pulls a Beretta Inox out from his front pocket for some strange reason:


What I found odd was that Tellis fired four rounds at the guy, and then kept chasing him, but you can see here in the background that there is a playground full of kids and nobody seems to notice. Well, it is Detroit.


Then the crack head takes a little child hostage, and Tellis takes several dangerous running shots which kills the guy, but also causes collateral damage on woman which I will refrain from talking about:


Notice that he isn't using the sights at all, but he is screaming. Not exactly what a cop should be doing under the circumstances.

Now, a year later Tellis is off the force, and he gets an offer to get his shield back if he looks into a case where a cop named Fredericks got killed. Fredericks real name was Calvess, and he was Henry Oak's partner.

Tellis goes to the range to sharpen his edge, and is seen here with a good solid grip on his Inox:


For some reason, he can't hit the target, but the camera pans to Oak firing his Smith & Wesson Model 686 left handed:


Oak carries the revolver in a nylon shoulder hoslter, but I find the speedloader pouch that he uses to look like a magazine pouch. Tell me I'm wrong:



Tellis and Oak become temporary partners as they re-investigate the shooting death of officer Calvess. While they were following up on a lead, they find a dead guy who was in possesion of a Mossberg 500 Cruiser:

Allegedly, the guy who had it had stuck some pot on the breach for a smoke, and when he closed the slide the burning pot set the round off which killed the guy. That's pretty far fetched, but it could be true.

Next, Tellis and Oak go to a crack head's house to ask him some questions. Tellis finds a stash of mouse guns in plastic baggies, as well as what looks like a pistol gripped shotgun and a police badge:



While both cops are not paying the crack head any attention, he pulls this Beretta Jetfire 950 from a shirt hung on the wall and shoots Tellis with the deadly ganster grip:



Oak takes his life with a few close range shots from his 686:


I have a few cop friends who assure me that if you shoot someone in the line of duty, that you can count on being suspended for a few months while an investigation is launched. This means that you won't be re-holstering your pistol and carrying on with your day.

Getting to the end, and leaving out a few big chunks of movie where there are no guns, we get to Telis and Oak getting ready to enter a large building that looks like an auto chop shop. Oak loads his trusty Remington 870 shotgun, and Tellis does a chamber check with his Inox:



They enter the structure and, for some reason, split up. Oak makes contact pretty fast with a scumbag, and fires first, but the guy fires some sort of explosive rounds from the looks of things. You be the judge:



The bullet blows out a big ass chunk of the wall!!

I want some of those rounds! Who needs full auto when you could take out half a herd of whitetails with one of these nasty things!!

Tellis makes contact with another scumbag who opens up with a submachine gun that I couldn't get a picture of. As the chase ends up on the roof, Tellis foolishly breaks cover from a very sturdy looking brick wall, and scumbag fires a long burst of ineffective fire that could have cost Tellis his life. Tellis dings the scumbag in the leg with his Inox using a pretty bad grip:


Oak and Tellis handcuff the two men together and start to search the place. Oak takes some time to shoot the scumbag's car with thermonuclear powered buckshot:

Good thing it's not night time.

Tellis finds a truck load of guns, with a AR-15, Browning High Power, a Glock, and a whole host of revolvers visible:


Oak questions the guys about the guns as he claims to have found Calvess' revolver in the trunk. The flashback scenes are the meat and potatoes of the investigation, and center around the use of Calvess' gun that was used against him in his murder. In one flashback from the beginning of the movie, the gun used on Calvess is a S&W Model 686 like Oak's:


In another scene, Calvess had a Colt Cobra:


And then we have thing weird mystery revolver that is supposed to have been Calvess', but can also be seen in place of Oaks revolver as he fires it next to the scumbags to intimidate them:


This looks like the same mystery gun used in Dawn of the Dead that I couldn't identify.

Oak goes outside to reload his 870, and Tellis starts talking to the two men to get the real story about what happened to Calvess. We can see his Inox tucked in his waistband instead of a holster:


The truth starts to come out that Oak was at the scene where Calvess was killed, and Tellis confronts Oak over the details. As you can imagine, things get tense:


Oak goes back in to force a confession out of the two scumbags, and Tellis, who is now disarmed, goes back to the cruiser to get the Colt Series 70 that is in the glove box:


Tellis has never held a 1911 in his life, as can be seen by the crossed thumbs grip:

And just check out the sparky bullets!!

Tellis shoots Oak somehow with a poor grip on the M1911 that has the hammer down because Oak is going to shoot the scumbags for not confessing:



The truth finally comes out, and we see that Calvess carried his revolver in his back pocket, and also carried a small auto pistol that I can't get a good ID on:



I can't spoil the movie for you, but if you check out the rest of the frames that I captured you can see what an exceptionally poor shot Calvess was.

That's it for tonight folks. It's well past my bed time. This is a very good but very gloomy movie that dives into the murky job that is narcotics policing. I'm not a fan of the tactic, but I'm sure that it's a dangerous job.

If you have any more requests, then by all means plant them on me.

P.S. I still haven't figured out how to make the pictures link back to my Photobucket account. Photobucket sent me an email telling me how to do it, but I'm not yet savy enough to figure out how to fix it.

Update: Thanks to Hell in a Handbasket for the link!

5 comments:

James R. Rummel said...

Good post yet again.

James

Bunnyman said...

Awesome! One of my favorite (soul-crushing) crime flicks.

Nitpick: in the firing range scene, Oak is shooting a Colt. If I had to guess, I'd say a Lawman. The easy way to distinguish Colt from Smith & Wesson is that most Colt trigger cut-outs have a 'hump' where the trigger hinges in the frame, whereas Smiths have ellipsoid guards (see Calvess' Smith 686 for comparison). The other big tip-off is the cylinder release, but it looks like you got that. On checking the Standard Catalog of Colt, I can't find any full-underlug models that match; I don't see a vent rib, so it's not a Python, Diamondback, or just about anything. The only match seems to be a Trooper MKIII with a barrel that ends the same place as the ejector shroud.

Also, the Colt Cobra is essentially an alloy-frame Detective Special, which even with the shrouded ejector rod (late models) is a great deal more dainty than the gun shown, and have a rear sight milled into the frame, rather than a target sight. Same gun as above - Trooper MKIII.

Bunnyman said...

Whoa, just caught one. Looks like Calvess pulls a J-Frame out of his pocket (cylinder release to right of thumb), which magically turns into...another Beretta 950? (Prop-reuse hunch.)

GM45 said...

I think you mean Colt KING Cobra, since the Colt Cobra is a Colt Detective Special with an aluminum frame, which the gun looks nothing like.

The mystery gun is some type of flash paper ISS revolver that is used in scenes when blanks are too dangerous to use. These guns are usually "based" on certain real models, but have an obvious difference from them.

Great post, I was getting worried you weren't going to post at all. I'd been checking for a few weeks now. At least you uploaded two movies! I'll check out GoodFellas now.

E in V said...

Shotgun is a Winchester M-1300 Defender.

As for shooting with the thumb over thumb position on a semi-auto action. I've seen 2-3 people at shooting ranges actually shooting that way! They have not had a problem shooting that way. Me, I'd get bit, but they were not having a problem with their thumb down low under the slilde! I even noted it to them, and showed them the more proper thumb position.