A water cannon is a device that shoots a high-velocity stream of water, which is frequently used for riot control. This weapon evolved from the use by authorities of fire hoses to quell riots in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Sometimes in fiction, a character (almost always The Hero) will still use a fire hose (or other high-pressure water source) as an Improvised Weapon. In most cases (especially if the wielder is The Hero) the target will be an individual or small group rather than a mob.
Very much Truth in Television as any firefighter can testify to the concussive force of a stream from a high-pressure hose, and the difficulty of getting back to your feet if you are being bombarded by it.
A Sister Trope to Water Hose Rodeo and to Deus Ax Machina, as many public and industrial buildings contain fire hoses (probably more than have fire axes).
Compare Making a Splash, where characters can do this without a hose. See Rescue Equipment Attack for violence committed via the use of fire extinguishers and other rescue equipment.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean, Jolyne is forcibly sprayed by the guards of the maximum security ward with a large hose for their amusement.
Film — Live Action
- Advance to the Rear: During the final battle between Company Q and Zattig's men, weapons include a fire hose, chamber pots, pans, a makeshift catapult built out of old crates, and at least one rolling pin.
- In The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man takes down an out-of-control Electro by blasting a fire hose at him from nearby. Spidey even wears a fire-helmet in that scene (besides giving a high-five to one of the firefighters).
- In Bet Your Life, Sonny uses the deluge gun on a fire boat to knock Joseph out of his helicopter: firing the stream of water in one door and out the other.
- The first Black Cat has a moment played for Fan Disservice when the arrested Catherine is tortured by the police by having a firehose blasted on her at max speed while in a t-shirt and panties.
- In The Bodyguard (Thai), when the titular character is pursued by a number of thugs in a warehouse, he notices a firehose nearby. He then turns it to maximum and blasts his way through everyone.
- Near the end of City War, after Ken has killed off all of Ted's henchmen in the abandoned bus depot, Ted ambushes Ken with a high-pressure hose (used for cleaning vehicles) and tries to drown Ken alive. The timely intervention of Ken's grievously wounded buddy Dick, who turns out to be Not Quite Dead, is what ultimately saves Ken's life by tripping Ted from the back.
- The Delinquent: When Boss Lam's minions attack the warehouse Shum works at as a night watchman, Shum briefly uses a water hose turned at full blast to defend himself from a bunch of thugs. It works for a short while, but a thug who enters from the back door hacks the pipe and stops the water altogether.
- Dragons Forever: Yip and several residents of the local fishing harbor drive away some land developers trying to force them into leaving via water-hose, even using the hose to send a few developers falling into the pier.
- In First Blood, one of the tortures the deputies subject Rambo to in the cells is blasting him with a high-pressure fire hose.
- Halloween Kills: When Michael emerges from the burning house, one of the firefighters attacks him by spraying him with his hose. Michael just walks right through it.
- At the climax of Herbie Rides Again, Alonzo Hawk's attempt at bulldozing Grandma Steinmetz's firehouse with her in it is temporarily slowed down by Grandma and the man she's dating using the firehouse's hose to toss the operators off their construction equipment until the hose bursts from overuse. Hawk only has a few seconds to gloat that they can't stop him before Herbie (and all of the Beetles in San Francisco) attack.
- Her Name Is Cat (unrelated to Black Cat above) has the police interrogating the arrested Femme Fatale assassin Cat by stripping her down and blasting her with a firehose while wearing only her undergarments. When Cat refuses to give in, they decide to have her tied up in a freezer, still dripping wet and barely clothed.
- Mannequin: Hollywood uses a fire hose to hold off a bunch of security guards so Jonathan can save Emmy from being killed in a trash compactor.
- The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alfred Hitchcock reported that the London police, who were cooperating with the production, objected to the police being shown using guns against the criminals holed up in a house behind the temple. When he asked them how they would deal with it, they suggested using fire engines and hoses: a technique which had been employed in the Siege of Sidney Street in 1911. Eventually, the police agreed to the scene showing the police using rifles, so long as they were shown as being specifically issued for the assault.
- Operation Delta Force: In the final shootout, one of the main villains, Praetorian, tries to make his escape carrying a sample of the Ebola viral antidote, and the Delta team are unable to gun him down for concerns about accidentally damaging the antidote's container. Cue Captain Lang grabbing a nearby firehose, turning it to full blast, and using the impact to knock Praetorian off his feet, subduing the villain long enough for the antidote's retrieval.
- In the second Problem Child movie, Trixie uses the school's fire hose against Junior, pushing him across the entire hallway.
- Played for laughs in UHF; when a kid finds a marble in a sandbox filled with oatmeal, he wins the prize of drinking from the firehose, which blows him across the room.
- In A View to a Kill, James Bond knocks the police chief over by opening a valve on the fire engine, blasting him with a high-pressure jet of water and allowing him and Stacy to escape in the confusion.
- Wolf Warrior 2 features a raid late in the film using armed drones, where most of the heroes are unarmed. They manage to turn the situation around by grabbing the emergency hose, turning the water to maximum and spraying the drones out the air.
Literature
- In Der Nasse Fisch by Volker Kutscher, the uniformed police connect a hose to a fire hydrant and hose down demonstrators in an illegal May Day parade. As this is taking place in the Weimar Republic in 1929, the observing Vice Squad detectives treat this as an entirely new tactic.
Live-Action TV
- All of Us Are Dead: Nam So-ju uses a fire hose to decent effect against a zombie horde when evacuating politician Park Eun-hee and her staff from a government building.
- Emergency!: On one occasion, the paramedics are trying to help a police officer who's been shot by a sniper in an apartment building. Engine 51 uses the truck's water cannon to spray the apartment windows, giving the paramedics cover to evacuate the wounded cop.
- MacGyver (1985):
- In "Last Stand", Mac uses the hose on the fire truck to knock a bad guy off of a motorcycle.
- In "Deathlock", Mac uses a high-pressure water outlet as a water cannon to push Quayle against an overloaded fuse box to electrocute and stun him, before finishing him off with a punch.
- In "Tough Boys", Mac weaves a fire hose through the rungs of a ladder, which enables him to aim the hose at the roof of building before turning on the hose and blasting the thug on the roof.
- A promo for the 2023 season of The Weekly with Charlie Pickering describes attempting to keep up with the constant flow of news as like "drinking from a fire hose". The ad then attempts to show Charlie as the man for the job by having him actually drink from a fire hose. A second before they turn the hose on, Charlie realises what a bad idea this is and tries to to get them to stop, but it is too late, and he is blasted out of his chair by the high power jet of water.
Professional Wrestling
- In a 1999 episode of WWE Raw, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin uses a firehose attached to a beer truck
to take out The Corporation.
- In a Call-Back in 2001, Kurt Angle takes out The Alliance, led by Steve Austin, using a firehose attached to a milk truck.
- In the 2023 WWE Smackdown, Angle brings out the milk truck again to hose down the Alpha Academy, who had interrupted his birthday celebration.
Video Games
- Disaster Report: In the level in the Lincoln Plaza, you come across a fire hose. At first, you use one that's on the ground floor — and it's incredibly powerful. How much? Well, it's so strong that it destroys debris like it was nothing. Better yet, you eventually use it to take down the only boss in this game — a helicopter containing the Bazooka Goon, by either "shooting" at an elevator lift or suspended pillars that resemble a chandelier. Either one will send it crashing and exploding. Read that again: you take down a helicopter with a fire hose.
- Disney's Magical Quest: In the first game, one of the outfits Mickey (or Minnie in the GBA version) obtains is a firefighter outfit, which uses the hose as a weapon, along with the utility of pushing blocks into better positions.
- Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage!: The large landblubber enemies in Breeze Harbor wear firefighter helmets and attack Spyro by spraying water at him from their hoses. They also use these hoses to put out fires.
Western Animation
- Snout Spout from Masters of the Universe is an Eternian fireman who wears a face-concealing helmet in the shape of an elephant's head. He's able to use the trunk to suck up nearby sources of water and blast it out at fires (and enemies) with the force of a heavy firehose, blasting fires.
- Squidbillies: In "Beware the Butt-Cutter", Sheriff waterhoses the suspect he arrested to silence him after being told that "Johnathan Long Island Ice Tea" is not a real name.
