In the thread about scenes that take you out of a movie, DrDeth said this:
And…he’s right. But if the good guy doesn’t drop the gun, it leads either to a really prolonged stand-off where everybody is saying, “Put the gun down,” and “Back off” and “I’ll kill her, I mean it” and so on. Really long…and boring… Or else it just leads to someone taking the shot.
But… If I want the scene to involve the good guys appearing to give up – so the bad guy can get in some quality monologuing – and so the heroes can win with a clever sneak attack – “Psst; I’ve still got my Batarang!” –
How would you do it?
What I’ve got, now, is:
Bad guy has hostage.
Good guys throw guns into crevasse.
Bad guy monologues a while, and lowers the aim of his gun.
Good guy throws knife.
End of problem…
Before the good guy throws the gun into the ravine he unloads the one round that was in the chamber and he palms it. Then as he nochalantly throws the gun away he says “Hey, anyway, guns don’t kill people, BULLETS kill people” and he throws the bullet so hard it goes though the bad guys eyesocket and into the brain, killing him.
ummm…am I the only one who thought of this: use a second gun.
Bad Guy grabs hostage.
Good Guy, after drawing his gun from the holster on his belt, is forced to throw it way without shooting.
Bad Guy starts talking, gets distracted for a fraction of a second.
4 At the moment when Bad Guy is distracted, Good Guy reaches under his jacket, and pulls another gun out of his sholder holster
Good guy shoots Bad Guy, saves hostage, and music plays.
ummm…am I the only one who thought of this: use a second gun.
Bad Guy grabs hostage.
Good Guy, after drawing his gun from the holster on his belt, is forced to throw it way without shooting.
Bad Guy starts talking, gets distracted for a fraction of a second.
4 At the moment when Bad Guy is distracted, Good Guy reaches under his jacket, and pulls another gun out of his sholder holster
Good guy shoots Bad Guy, saves hostage, and a commercial for beer/pickup trucks/Viagra begins.
The good guy lowers his gun to the floor and slowly places it on the rug. Then, with a swift pull, he tugs the rug sending both villain and hostage tumbling. Good guy picks up his gun before the stunned bad guy can find where he dropped his gun in the spill.
It seems to me that I’ve seen exactly that scene before, at some point. Probably on a TV show. Hero gets disarmed, bad guy apparently has the upper hand, hero pulls a second gun out of an ankle holster and shoots bad guy. The hero even quipped afterwards, “I got tired of losing my gun, so I started carrying a second one.”
But I can’t remember what show it was, or who the hero was. Does it ring any bells with anyone?
They did that once on Star Trek: Enterprise. But they were using phasers, so the hostage was only stunned!
How about this:
The good guy drops his gun and keeps the bad guy talking so he doesn’t automatically shoot him. This provides a distraction so the gun can run around behind the bad guy and blow his head off because the gun was in reality a Decepticon.
A spec ops guy has been stationed in the space above the ceiling. He crawls over on the support beams to where he hears the hostage drama taking place. He uses one of those automatic grappling hooks that embeds itself on the bottom of the upper floor, silently removes the ceiling tile, couples his harness to the grappling hook cord, activates the pulley while keeping a thumb on the control, lowers himself behind the hostage taker like Spider-man, and plugs the bad guy from behind in the back of the head.
The bad guy says drop your weapon. The good guy turns his back to the bad guy and shoots his gun in the opposite direction as he’s putting it on the ground. He then puts his hands up and turns around to talk to the bad guy for a minute or two. Then the bad guy falls over dead. The bullet traveled around the airless, extremely dense asteroid, making one orbit and hitting the bad guy in the back. See, he didn’t even hear the gun being fired because they are in space.
The answer isn’t to toss the gun and throw a knife, or pull a backup piece, or whatever. If you don’t believe you can talk down the perpetrator, the correct thing to do is maintain your aim, keep talking, and wait for him to get careless or tired and expose his entire head, then shoot him in the head aiming at the base of the nose. While shooting accurately with a pistol is not as easy as television and film makes it out to be, a competent, well-trained shooter should be able to put a round out of a service-grade pistol within a 5" diameter circle at ~10 meters on a stationary target from a two-hand stance, which will likely kill or at least temporarily paralyze a perpetrator from shock even if it doesn’t destroy the brain stem. If you don’t think you can shoot with this degree of precision or your pistol isn’t that accurate, you probably shouldn’t be carrying a firearm at all.
Art Mullen: Hell of a shot. Did you consider what might have happened if you missed?
Tim Gutterson: I can’t carry a tune, I don’t know how to shoot a basketball, and my handwriting is, uh, barely legible. But I don’t miss.
IIRC- The Japanese gangster movie “Tokyo Drifter” has a similar scene, but the good guy throws his gun in the air in an arc–the bad guys follow the gun not the guy…the guy then catches his own gun and shoots the two bad guys with it. An easy switch could be having the good guy toss the gun in the air, with the bad guy’s attention following the gun…the good guy pulls the knife and throws it.
You lose the monologue but you can get there by just having the bad getting the drop on the good guy so it’s not a stand off–the good guy just has the gun but doesn’t have it pointed at the bad guy. Bad guy is free to talk for a bit before demanding the good guy lose the gun.
And don’t just shoot the hostage, go full auto and empty a whole clip or two into the hostage.