The Internet Movie Firearms Database is, like Al Pacino’s character Lefty says in Donnie Brasko, a “beautiful thing.” It doesn’t particularly make our lives any better, nor doesn’t enrich the Internet in the same way that iMDB has, but you still have to admire the perseverance in setting up, maintaining and contributing to a website like this. Take the 1997 John Woo opus Face/Off, for instance, starring John Travolta and Nicholas Cage. There are more guns in that film than are being smuggled from neglected munition depots in the former Soviet Union, and here’s a guy who’s been cataloging them all! An excerpt:
Castor Troy’s (Nicolas Cage) weapons of choice are two gold titanium nitride plated Springfield Armory M1911-A1 V-10s fitted with custom gold inlaid grips, that he keeps in two small-of-the-back holsters. Among the obvious modifications to the guns include skeletonized hammers, beavertail grip safeties, ambidextrous slide stop safeties, target sites, moderately bevelled magazine wells, and V-10 ported slides/barrels. He uses them both during the first major gunfight of the movie, putting a hole in the windshield of the helicopter Sean Archer (John Travolta) is in and later gunning down several agents in the airport hangar. Later in the movie, when Archer has assumed Troy’s identity and face, he is given these weapons by Dietrich (Nick Cassavettes). He then uses them for the proceeding gunfight as the police raid the building.
