Guns of the Silver Screen: V23N2
By Kyle Shea
“The Foreigner”
Jackie Chan is one of the greatest martial arts masters in the world. He has been starring in movies since the 1960s and is well known for his physical comedy and for doing his own stunts. Some of his movies include the “Rush Hour” movies, “Shanghai Noon,” “Shanghai Knights” and “The Forbidden Kingdom.” One of his most recent movies is “The Foreigner.” Based on the book, The Chinaman, by Stephen Leather, Jackie Chan plays an older man named Quan who loses his daughter when she is killed in a terrorist bombing. Filled with anger and wanting revenge, he spends the rest of the movie hunting down the people responsible for his daughter’s death. In order to accomplish this, he pursues and pressures a Northern Ireland politician named Liam, played by Pierce Brosnan, believing he knows the location of the terrorists.
In one scene in the movie, Jackie Chan’s character smuggles a gun into an apartment using a tool bag. The gun is an ArmaLite AR-180 without the buttstock and has an improvised suppressor at the end of the barrel. The ArmaLite AR-180 is the semi-automatic version of the AR-18, a rifle designed by Arthur Miller—the same man who helped design the AR-15 with Eugene Stoner, who later designed the Stoner 63. The ArmaLite AR-180 shoots 5.56x45mm NATO from a number of different capacity magazines at a rate of 750 rounds per minute. The AR-180 in the movie was made by the Sterling Armaments Company in the UK. There was also a special prop gun made for the movie. The rifle was not a big hit in the market, but it was influential in the creation of other rifles, including the Japanese Howa Type 89.
Another gun used in the movie is the SIG SG 552 Commando. It is used by Liam’s nephew Sean, played by Rory Fleck-Byrne. He uses it on a hunt for Quan in the woods near where his uncle is hiding. The SG 552 Commando was produced in Switzerland by SIG Combibloc Group. It is one of many variants of the...
This article first appeared in Small Arms Review V23N2 (February 2019) |
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