10.25.2008
I'm watching Replacement Killers on NetFlix On Demand and the gun fights have had me thinking. It's a thought that occurred to me while watching the first Bad Boys and frankly any movie with machine guns. And the thought is this:
Action movies are a lot less interesting with machine guns than without.
There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, machine guns are just bullets flying through the air with little to no aiming and used for supposed dramatic effect. But since the bad guys are just waving them through the air, shooting in a seeming random fashion, there's little suspense as to whether anyone is going to hit anything.
This leads to my second point, which is that without aiming at anything and thus without the duel aspect, it achieves nothing but to fill screen time.
Thirdly, these movies seem to ignore that the Assault Weapons Ban ever passed in America. Seriously. Machine guns are a rarity even in this country, much less anywhere else that is half way developed. And we have the right to bear arms for Christ's sake. I liked Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels because it was all about just getting a gun much less using one. And that was in the UK. Since most action movies are Stateside, how about playing to some of the realism here, yeah?
I'm thinking of this because when I was back in California, I got to shoot my brother-in-law's guns. They were pistols. And they take a little time to figure out not just how to shoot but how to shoot well. And by this, I mean that time is required and thus skill. Without skill, you're not hitting anything.
With a machine gun, there are enough bullets that basically there is little skill required because you can just spray the room and anything within range is bound to be hit by a bullet. But what fun is that? And by "fun" I mean dramatic effect. I don't care if ten unskilled gunmen are shooting at the hero, by simple fact that they have machine guns it insinuates that they have no skill and will not hit the hero.
On the other hand, if the hero is faced with ten men with pistols, it implies to me that he's facing ten men with skill and thus a (remote) chance of hitting him. That is dramatic. Whether or not they actually do make a single shot count.
I'm also thinking about this because of the novel I've been writing. In my novel, there's not a machine gun to be found. Mostly because of the above mentioned reasons and also because, in my mind, when you want someone dead, you're doing to send someone with enough skill to get the job done, done for sure, and done with as few other people dead as possible. After all, shooting everyone in sight but the person you're after seems to attract attention, and the wrong kind at that, then perhaps you'd want.
And let us not forget the words of Leon in The Professional, the better you get at cleaning, the closer you get to the client. Thusly, the more bad ass a character is supposed to be at killing people, the less interesting it is to throw them into a scene with a machine gun when they should be using a knife, yeah?
Let us never forget that the key to making a story interesting is conflict. And if the conflict the main or even peripheral characters are thrown into is less than the skill level that has been built up, the less successful the conflict is.
There is also this, which is that in a state, country, or world where machine guns are hard to come by, having anyone armed like the U.S. Fucking Army just breaks with the reality defined and pulls the reader, viewer, or whomever out of the story. Remember, the number one rule of storytelling is that you can define whatever rules you want but, after you have, those rule must be obeyed. If they're not then the whole thing comes off as false.
I'm just saying.
I'm also working on an idea about an assassin and I still haven't included machine guns. Why? Because it's set in "modern day" New York and in that setting handguns much less machine guns are tough to come by. That and machine guns just aren't interesting.
I do make one exception and that is for movies about armies. Take Black Hawk Down as an example. But even there, machine guns are used with available ammunition as a constraint. They fire three-shot bursts. No one empties the fucking clip. And no one sprays a whole room unless they're a kid with an AK-47 that doesn't know real marksmanship and battle effectiveness.
So why am I watching Replacement Killers? Dude... have you seen Mira Sorvino?
'Nuff said.