The GLOCK 17 Pistol in Movies

Click to listen to the audio version of this article.

It’s wild to think that the GLOCK 17 is getting close to its 40th birthday, but it is. The Austrian gun that popularized polymer-frame, striker-fired pistols and opened the door to the era of the Wonder-Nines, hit the U.S. market back in 1988, the first offering from the fledgling Austrian gunmaker started by a man with no gun-designing on his resume at that point. 

The GLOCK went on to take over the pistol market to a large degree, and Hollywood has been there from the beginning — well, technically earlier than that. Here’s a brief history of the GLOCK 17 pistol’s most important appearances in movies.

Back before the G17 was available in gun stores stateside, the earliest version of the pistol was featured in a third-season episode of the hit TV series Miami Vice that aired in January 1987. Part of that show’s schtick was that Sonny Crockett (Don Johnson) always carried and used cutting-edge firearms, especially pistols. That extended to this one-off episode “Cuba Libre” when Crockett, while in Cuba, takes a GLOCK 17 off of a rebel soldier and uses it for the rest of the episode. By that season, he was carrying a Smith & Wesson 645 but was forced to give it up.  

For anyone paying attention to the relatively non-descript black pistol on 1987-TV resolution, it was their very first exposure to the GLOCK. 

The first movie to feature the GLOCK 17 was released in 1989 — not many people remember Johnny Handsome, a hard-boiled Mickey Rourke vehicle that landed poorly. While the pistol is only featured in one scene, the movie is worth noting because it’s the only movie appearance of the short-lived “Tupperware” plastic case in which the pistol was originally sold.

The gun’s first major exposure in a movie is also its most infamous. The gun was featured prominently as the pistol carried by the terrorist operatives in 1990’s Die Hard 2, but it’s a piece of dialog from John McClane (Bruce Willis) that cemented an erroneous reputation for the GLOCK pistol in the U.S. for some time to come. 

When describing the GLOCK 17 carried by the guys he just got into a shootout with in the Dulles Airport’s baggage area, McClane says, “That punk pulled a GLOCK 7 on me. You know what that is? It’s a porcelain gun made in Germany. It doesn’t show up on your airport X-ray machines, and it costs more than you make in a month.” 

Now, there’s a lot wrong with that line, including the name of the gun itself. The GLOCK did not and has never had any porcelain components — most components aside from the frame are steel, the gun is made in Austria, not Germany, and it most certainly shows up in an X-ray. Nevertheless, the gun got a rep as being able to beat X-ray machines and metal detectors, depending on who you talked to. 

The GLOCK 17 showed up here and there throughout the early 1990s until it got some screen time in a big-budget release carried by John Clark (Willem DaFoe) in Clear and Present Danger (1994), adapted from the popular Tom Clancy novel. His pistol was an early model outfitted with an extended barrel for use with a suppressor. 

From there on, it started showing up everywhere on the big and small screens. And it never stopped. 

Now you might be thinking, what about The Fugitive (1993)? Tommy Lee Jones made the G17 famous when he carried it as a U.S. Marshal hunting down Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford), right? Nope. That 1993 blockbuster actually featured the newer GLOCK 22 chambered in .40 S&W. Now, in movies made when the Marshals and the FBI were using the G22 in real life, the gun you saw in movies was still a GLOCK 17 — simply because it’s easier to get the higher pressure 9mm blanks to cycle firearms. 

But, for The Fugitive and its sequel U.S. Marshals (1998), Tommy Lee Jones carried a real GLOCK 22. The gun used in the former movie was actually sold by Heritage Auctions in 2018, so it’s confirmed.

In the original Bad Boys (1995), Will Smith and Martin Lawrence play larger-than-life Miami police detectives. Marcus (Lawrence) carries a Smith & Wesson 4506, and Mike Lowrey carries a SIG Sauer P226 and a SIG P230 as a backup gun. But when they came back for the even more successful action sequel, Lowrey dual-wields 2nd and 3rd generation GLOCK 17s as his standard firearms, both got a lot of close-up screen time, and their chrome slides sure made them stand out. There are also a LOT of standard G17s throughout the movie. Marcus, however, switched to a chrome-slide P226. 

And there have been so many big-screen appearances since — Tom Cruise used a G17 in Mission: Impossible 3 (2006), though it was standing in as a tranquilizer gun, Denzel Washington used a G17 in the excellent Man on Fire (2004) — they show up in the Jason Bourne movies and in several entries of the Saw horror series. And speaking of horror, the GLOCK 17 is featured prominently in Scream 2 and Scream 4. 

More recently, the GLOCK 17 has shown up in every entry of the ultra-popular John Wick film series, along with plenty of other GLOCK models, more Bad Boys sequels, and plenty of Marvel movies, especially as the firearms carried by SHIELD operatives, Nick Fury, and many others.