Machine pistols in fiction

Machine pistols have been depicted in in movies in genres ranging from war movies and crime thrillers to science fiction films. Machine pistols are handgun-style, often magazine-fed and self-loading firearms, capable of fully automatic or burst fire, and normally chambered for pistol cartridges,
Film examples
In the 1987 science fiction-action movie RoboCop, the title character uses a Beretta 93R with a futuristic dress and retitled the "Auto-9". A review of the film noted that even though it was a futuristic film, the film's design esthetic depicted machine pistols in a manner that was "...firmly grounded in design trends that were already at work in the 1980’s": the futuristic-looking and "...daunting machine pistol was just a slight redress of a real-world firearm, the Beretta Auto-9." In 1994, Time Magazine noted the way that director Quentin Tarantino had his characters use machine pistols in films like Pulp Fiction: "Tarantino's movies are smartly intoxicating cocktails of rampage and meditation; they're in-your-face, with a mac-10 machine pistol and a quote from the Old Testament".

The UK Mirror review of the 2003 vampire-action film Underworld remarks that the main character, "Selene (Kate Beckinsale) is a death dealer, a vampire whose job it is to hunt down and kill the Lycans...with the aid of a skin-tight catsuit, a magic pistol that fires like a machine gun and never runs out of bullets...". The reviewer is referring to the Beretta 93R handguns which were able to fire in full automatic bursts. The PluggedInOnline review of the 2003 film The Matrix Reloaded states that "ne of the film's most striking moments is a slo-mo treatment of Trinity diving off the top of a skyscraper, firing her pistols as she falls. Globules of fire belch from the barrels, lighting up the darkness around her." The reviewer is referring to the pair of pistols wielded by actress Carrie-Anne Moss.

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