Remember on Miami Vice when Don Johnson sleeps with a woman who swipes his gun when he goes back to work and he doesn't notice that his holster is two pounds lighter until he's in a gunfight and finds he has to use his back-up gun? Then he goes back to get his gun and tells her, "That was a major un-cool, baby."
Cops really do carry "back-up guns", but usually they're to plant on unarmed people they've killed. I remember a case where an exceptionally thrifty cop used a cap gun for this purpose. He wasn't charged with any crime, but they fired him thus enraging the police union.
Paul Schrader attacked Brian De Palma, and it seems like someone else said something rude about him, so I turned on Brian De Palma's terrorism movie, Domino, which was listed as one of the ten worst movies of the year. Set in Denmark. Starring a guy with a Polish-looking name.
The movie begins with a Danish cop hurrying to work and forgetting his gun. This gets his partner killed by a terrorist, then they steal a scene from Veritgo.
The movie is in English. They distinguish the Americans from the Danes by having the CIA agents act obnoxious and speak in vaguely Southwestern accents.
At no time in history have Europeans had any real qualms about killing people, but their cops have different approaches to carrying guns. In Diva (France, 1981) the police chief borrows the detective's gun because he did bring his. Carlos the Jackal escaped arrest at one point because the cops came to his apartment on their way home from work and weren't armed. In Insomnia (Norway, 1997) the Norwegian police comment on how the Swedish police carry their guns all the time. In the Swedish detective series Wallander, someone lectures Kurt Wallander that shooting people is a requirement of the job.
De Palma stole that other Alfred Hitchcock thing. Vertigo was set in San Francisco, so the opening shot is of a cable car, Hitchcock's movie about spies in Holland had their secret headquarters in a windmill. In North by Northwest, they have the UN building in New York, big giant cornfields in the midwest and it ends at Mt Rushmore.
In this movie, they drive through Holland stop in front of a big windmill and it ends in a bullfighting arena in Spain.
It wasn't terrible but it wasn't very interesting.
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