What The @&#%?!

Soldiers’ storm down a villa staircase equipped with an assortment of assault rifles in order to immobilize the intruder. Yelling obscenities, the soldiers point and fire their weapons at the man, John Matrix (Arnold Schwarzenegger), as he dives behind a group of bushes. He then rises from the bushes on the enemies’ right flank and begins his counter attack firing the M60 medium machine gun from his hip he takes out his targets directly in front of him. He continues the assault walking down a path never once letting go of the trigger and carries on his brutal onslaught, hitting his targets out to what appears to be over 150 meters. This scene was from the movie Commando which is a perfect illustration of how Hollywood exaggerates their action sequences, and how they overdue their weapons effects.

For years Hollywood has been creating amazing action movies from Apocalypse Now, to movies like Transformers. These movies contain edge of your seat kick ass action scenes where the viewers are in awe as they watch these big screen heroes slay their enemies, but what a lot of these movies lack is the realism of what the weapons being used are actually capable of doing.  For example the scene I just described where Arnold is shooting with incredible accuracy from the hip, while feasible to perform this maneuver it is entirely unrealistic due to the weapons power. Being that it is a medium machine gun firing, a 7.62mm round, which is meant to take out light skinned vehicles’ such as a car or truck, the M60’s recoil would throw that weapon’s rounds all over the place. Another unrealistic part to this scene is the fact that the M60’s firing rate is 600 rounds per minute and seeing how the clip was approximately two minutes long and he was carrying at least a 100 round belt where was the reload?

With the aid of MythBusters and my extensive knowledge of weaponry there is another movie where Hollywood takes it too far. The Parkour chase sequence in Casino Royale where James Bond (Daniel Craig) is chasing an individual through a skyscraper construction site and winds up in what seems to be a military compound surrounded by armed guards and no way out Bond quickly draws his Walter P99 9mm pistol and fires one round at a set of propane tanks mounted on the wall. These tanks explode sending the guards flying through the air, and Bond swiftly exits during the chaos. While this scene is awesome, it is very fictional. MythBusters is a show where the cast takes these scenarios and put them to a test to see if a lot of these Hollywood movies scenes are possible, and they “busted” this scene on one of their episodes. I have also tried this experiment where I took my Mossberg 500, loaded it with slugs and fired it at a propane tank. What happened was that the propane tank cracked and rolled around on the ground, ejecting its contents into the air.

The action movies that Hollywood produces are, for the most part, visually stunning, but for Military people such as myself find that these movies are full ridiculous non-sense. A machine gun cannot be fired from the hip, a propane tank will not explode with a 9mm round, and a grenade will not blow up a city block! The truth of the situation is that Hollywood should at least do research to make some of these action sequences more realistic.