There is something viscerally attractive about the Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun. Part of that was forbidden fruit. As a gun nerd coming of age in the 1980’s, I rightfully assumed I would never even touch a real MP5 myself. Nowadays semi-auto MP5 clones of all shapes and sizes are readily available at reasonable cost. I really hadn’t seen that coming.
Heckler & Koch has forever been inordinately proud of their wares. MP5’s in the movies always seemed to imply that their Bad Guy users were well-financed and serious, a predictably higher grade of scum. Particularly early on, movie armorers had to get creative to source these weapons for theatrical productions.
MP5 Origin Story
The 9mm MP5 was an evolutionary development of the 7.62 NATO G3 battle rifle which was itself a descendent of the Spanish CETME and the late-war prototype German StG45. Factory full auto examples were obviously prohibited from importation for sale to civilians. The next best thing was the semiautomatic HK94 that hit our shores in 1983.
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In addition to the lack of a functional giggle switch, the HK94 sported a lame 16-inch barrel. The civilian HK94 also inexplicably eschewed the midline flapper magazine release of the military weapon. To create functional theatrical props prior to the 1986 machinegun ban, movie armorers pruned the barrels back, converted the guns to full auto, and adapted them to fire blanks.
As this is a roller-delayed blowback action, all that took was a perforated plug threaded into the bore to provide a transient pressure pulse to cycle the action with each round fired. Factory barrels include a tri-lug suppressor mount. The smooth barrel and, to a lesser degree, the lack of a midline magazine catch are the quickest ways to differentiate these early guns from the factory sort on-screen.
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Big Screen Horsepower
The first converted HK94’s I recall seeing on the big screen were in 1985 in Rambo: First Blood Part II and Commando. A year later, Schwarzenegger wielded a curious version of the weapon that retained its long gimpy barrel and a perforated barrel shroud with a vertical foregrip in Raw Deal. Mel Gibson’s character Martin Riggs used a tricked-out converted HK94 with a fixed stock and an optical sight briefly at the end of the 1987 buddy cop opus Lethal Weapon. That same year, Schwarzenegger’s commando team packed converted HK94’s into the jungle hunting the Predator. All of that led up to the one MP5 movie to rule them all — Die Hard.
Die Hard & The Submachine Gun
Die Hard saw European mercenary thieves seizing the Nakatomi Building in LA. Bruce Willis’ disillusioned wisecracking cop John McClain faced them predictably alone. As Hans Gruber’s posse was supposed to be packing state of the art hardware, that meant chopped and converted HK94s and a full-auto Steyr AUG. The result has become a Christmas action classic.
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McClain liberates his MP5 clone from a demised terrorist before writing, “Ho-Ho-Ho. Now I Have a Machinegun” on the dead man’s sweatshirt. He then uses the gun alongside his Beretta 92F (incidentally, the same exact prop pistol that was used in Lethal Weapon) to fight his way through the building. The only time he extends the buttstock is to use the gun as an anchor as he transits floors via an elevator shaft.
As always seems to be the case, McClain is preternaturally accurate despite never using the buttstock and always firing from the hip. To his credit, he does eventually run out of ammo. With the crystalline clarity of hindsight, it was most likely Die Hard that really lit my fire about landing one of these sexy guns of my own. I spent the next several decades chasing that goal.
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Serious Iron
One of the earliest examples of true milspec MP5’s on the big screen was the surprisingly good 1982 depiction of a 22d SAS embassy takedown in The Final Option. That movie has been marketed elsewhere as Who Dares Wins. In this action epic, the assaulting SAS operators all carry legit milspec MP5’s. During the actual attack on Princes Gate in 1980, the SAS did not have enough MP5A3’s in inventory to outfit all of their assaulters. As a result, some troops packed stubby little MP5K’s, while others had sound-suppressed MP5SD’s. Since that time, milspec MP5’s have seen action in dozens of movies and TV shows.
The 2003 remake of SWAT, Mr. and Mrs. Smith two years later, and about a zillion others have splashed the MP5 across screens both large and small. Act of Valor, Hot Fuzz, Blackhawk Down, Sicario, and many more sported awesome MP5 action. Some lesser-known variants got screentime as well.
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The stubby little chopped MP5K saw service in Scrooged, Lethal Weapon 2, Terminator 2, True Lies, The Matrix, and the underappreciated gem The Long Kiss Goodnight. The MP5K PDW, the same gun with a stubby bit of barrel and side-folding Choate buttstock, can be seen in Last Action Hero, The Kingdom, and the Bond film Quantum of Solace. Some of the best MP5K PDW action can be found in the 2012 Jeremy Renner spy thriller The Bourne Legacy.
Airsoft-Style MP5
Prior to the availability of blank-adapted MP5K’s, movie makers often settled for the Daisy Softair Model 15 MP5K. This airsoft-style toy fired plastic pellets contained within reusable polymer cases. The gun was the spitting image of the real steel save that the receiver was unnaturally stretched between the magwell and the vertical foregrip assembly. Once you see that, you cannot unsee it. Gunspotting these old pellet guns is a fun exercise for the gun nerd truly serious about his craft. Starting points include The Silence of the Lambs, Passenger 57, RoboCop 3, and Canadian Bacon.
The apex predator among MP5 variants both on and off the screen is the elusive MP5SD. Arguably one of the best depictions of this specialized gun was one of its earliest movies. Navy SEALs depicted Michael Biehn and Charlie Sheen as globetrotting commandos hunting down stolen military weapons and bloodthirsty terrorists. Those sound-suppressed MP5SD’s coupled with that ridiculous movie suppressed gunshot sound precipitated a veritable fit of rapture back when I first saw Navy SEALs in the theater with a handful of Army buddies back in 1990.
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Bruce Willis used a bodged-together MP5SD clone to good effect in The Jackal back in 1997.Die Another Day, Bad Boys II, The Punisher, The Bourne Supremacy, Terminator Salvation, and Extraction all had at least a little SD sweetness here and there. The real SD is unusual in that it incorporates a series of small ports bored into the barrel. These ports drop standard velocity 9mm ball rounds into the subsonic range for maximum stealth. That’s just an excuse for movie Foley artists to make it sound even cooler than it is.
Practical Tactical
I chose to replicate the MP5 scenes in Die Hard during our range time together. Holding the gun at arm’s length with the stock collapsed and aiming above the iron sights, I was able to keep maybe 90% of my rounds in Hans Gruber’s likeness at across-the-room distances. Extend the stock and take your time, and that group shrinks to the size of a tea saucer. Running the weapon in its collapsed mode with your arms outstretched looks better than it works.
Both in The Final Option and in the real world, 22d SAS operators would terminate terrorists at close range with long continuous bursts. SAS troopers trained to mag dump into bad guys just to ensure an expeditious stop. Unlike most handheld automatic weapons, the MP5 really does lend itself to such stuff.
Ruminations
Blank adapting an MP5 is easier to do than you might think. I scored a GI-surplus slip-on blank adaptor and a case of Canadian-surplus 9mm blanks for not a lot of cash. The end result has quite literally no recoil and will produce the most adorable little muzzle flashes when fired after dark. These blanks are not terribly loud, but they have been surprisingly reliable. Even on a semiauto clone, the effect is positively recreational.
The MP5 is just as cool today as it was when John Rambo introduced us to it back in 1983 in First Blood Part II. Stallone didn’t even fire that gun on-screen. Now, some 43 years later, this slick German buzzgun yet remains a reliable crowd-pleaser.
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