The Fifth Element
It's probably in Bruce Willis's contract that if he gets cast as the reluctant hero, he's obligated to kick serious ass at least once throughout the proceedings. Luc Besson's The Fifth Element is such a strange cocktail of sci-fi, slapstick, and dramatic intrigue that it's hard to predict just what form said Willis asskickery would take. So it occurs in the second-half and is so worth the wait: rubbery monsters storm an opera house, the singer gets assassinated, and Willis, without a gun at first, is in charge of saving a flamboyant Chris Tucker and a mob of libertines. It's an exhilarating firefight, replete with Besson's kinetic camerawork juxtaposed with Willis's steely no-nonsense.
Tombstone
Perhaps no style of film has romanticized gunfights more than the Western -- and the somewhat cartoonish, largely consequence-free nature of classic Western violence made the genre ripe for revisionist (and more emotionally resonant) fare such as 1993's Tombstone, which depicts the unfortunately eventful "retirement" of legendary Wild West lawman Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell), whose feud with a band of outlaws led by "Curly Bill" Brocious (Powers Boothe) illustrates the sad echo of violence -- even of the righteous variety -- and the horrible toll it takes on a man's soul. This scene, which recreates the oft-fetishized Battle at the O.K. Corral, serves up a generous helping of satisfying Hollywood shootout action, while making clear the black regret and terrible destruction that lies in its real-life wake.
Bonnie and Clyde
Not every memorable gunfight is a battle among equals. Like the Battle of Little Bighorn, the Tyson-Spinks fight, and Super Bowl XX, the climactic shootout in Bonnie and Clyde is famous for being absurdly one-sided. Bank-robbing sweethearts Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) certainly knew how to handle firearms, but caught flat-footed by heavily armed g-men while helping a friend-turned snitch change a tire, they didn't stand a chance. One of the key works in the "New Hollywood" era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Bonnie and Clyde ushered in a period of more intense onscreen violence -- and made its protagonists countercultural martyrs.
Equilibrium
"Gun Kata" might sound like something a group of especially precocious second graders might make up for a playground fight during recess, but in the world of Kurt Wimmer's (admittedly rather Matrix-esque) 2002 dystopian sci-fi action epic Equilibrium, it's the name of a fun-to-watch martial art that allows its masters to determine where their opponents will stand, stab, or shoot at any given moment. One such master is John Preston (Christian Bale), who rebels against the emotion-outlawing government of Libria by colluding with an underground resistance to help assassinate the shadowy leader known as Father. Preston is found out -- and Father is, of course, not who he seems -- but not even a building full of machine gun-wielding guards can prevent Preston from kata-ing his way straight to Father's inner sanctum, delivering a slew of eye-popping deaths as he goes...and saving the best for last.
Scarface
In a roundabout way, Tony Montana embodies the perseverance of the human spirit. With a veritable army invading his house, he doesn't stop shooting (or swearing, for that matter), unloading round after round from his machine gun despite facing the prospect of certain death. Forget chewing the scenery -- as the iconic drug lord, Al Pacino gobbles it up, spits it out, and goes back for seconds. Not that that's a bad thing; if a scene requires an actor to shout "Say hello to my leetle friend!" while discharging a grenade launcher, it's preferable to have someone who can deliver such a line with panache. Tony's downfall might have been inevitable, but if you're gonna go down, it's best to go down swinging.
Commando
Future California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger plows through an army that's only slightly smaller than the population of the Golden State in Commando. As John Matrix (Best. Name. Ever), Ah-nold is on the trail of Bennett, a former member of his elite commando unit, who's made the suicidal mistake of kidnapping Matrix's daughter. Matrix is remarkably calm while he's mowing down Bennett's henchmen; later, he provides some priceless stress-management advice to his nemesis: "Let off some steam, Bennett." (The mansion where the climactic shootout takes place is probably in need of repairs -- it's the same place where Axel Foley took down Victor Maitland in Beverly Hills Cop.)
Shoot 'Em Up
American audiences have become so inured to the sights and sounds of gunfights in the movies that sometimes, the only thing to do is give in to the mind-numbing goofiness of it all and let loose with 86 minutes of rock 'em, sock 'em barrels-blazin' action -- like, for instance, 2007's Shoot 'Em Up, in which the mysterious, seemingly indestructible Mr. Smith (Clive Owen) has an ammo-loaded custody battle over a baby who is the unlikely target of a gang of thugs led by the madly sputtering Hertz (Paul Giamatti). As per its title, the movie is stacked with shootouts, but our favorite is this warehouse slaughter, which finds Smith sending Hertz's goons to their doom via a series of artfully arranged, string-triggered guns that would have made Jim Henson proud. (Actually, probably not, but they're still pretty awesome.)
The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
Clint Eastwood has been involved in a lot of memorable shootouts over the years, from Dirty Harry to last year's Grand Torino. But nothing can top the final scene in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, in which the Man With No Name (Eastwood) stares down his arch-nemesis Sentenza (Lee Van Cleef) and his occasional ally Tuco (Eli Wallach). The Mexican standoff scene has been imitated in countless films, but no one's come close to duplicating it; Sergio Leone's extreme close-ups and Ennio Morricone's thrillingly bombastic scoring make for a scene that makes up in tension what it lacks in pure firepower.
Wanted
Every time we think we've seen the absolute ultimate in highly stylized, adrenaline-goosing cinematic action, technology -- and a director with an eye for unforgettable set pieces -- comes long to prove us wrong. Such was the case with 2008's Wanted, which found director Timur Bekmambetov turning the Mark Millar comic into a sleek, giddy celebration of ridiculously over the top film violence. Wanted overflows with gunplay, but for our money, the movie's sweetest ride is this opening shootout/high-speed chase, which pits the Fox (Angelina Jolie) against an assassin named Cross (Thomas Kretschmann) in a battle involving loads of high-tech weaponry, some remarkable acrobatic feats, one sweet sports car, and, yes, curving bullets. Where's that sequel?
Heat
Often, movie gunplay is used as a method of releasing tension in a story, giving audiences a visceral thrill while pausing the serious business of exposition and setting characters more or less free on the canvas. In other cases, however, gunfights are actually used to increase tension -- and this interminable, nail-biting standoff between an LAPD squad led by Lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) and the crew of master thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), from Michael Mann's 1995 action classic Heat, is a perfect example, mainly because it all feels so real -- a messy blend of screaming chaos and spooky, unnatural silence depicted in this scene.
The Wild Bunch
Pike Bishop (William Holden) sums up director Sam Peckinpah's modus operandi for The Wild Bunch thusly: "If they move, kill 'em." Peckinpah was a master of exhilarating, fatalistic onscreen violence, and The Wild Bunch is probably his greatest work -- as well as his most controversial (because of the level of violence, the MPAA threatened the film with an X rating). The Bunch is a gang of outlaws who know their way of life is closing in on them -- and don't take well to being betrayed by a corrupt warlord. The Bunch's last stand is one of the bloodiest scenes in movie history, and the film exerted a powerful influence on everyone from John Woo to Quentin Tarantino.
The Killer
Few directors can match John Woo when it comes to staging balletic onscreen violence. Woo's oeuvre contains so many outrageously kinetic set pieces that it's difficult to choose just one. If pressed, we'd have to go with the climactic shootout in The Killer, which is kind of like the video for Prince's "When Doves Cry" crossed with the finale of Scarface. Woo's Hong Kong films may be insanely bloody, but what makes them resonate beyond their explosive energy are his deeply moral characters; in The Killer, a hit man (Chow Yun-Fat) and a cop (Danny Lee Sau-Yin) team up to protect a blind woman (Sally Yeh) from the Triads. The extreme loyalty that binds this unlikely trio (and the fact that they make their last stand in a church) lends heft to one of the bloodiest shootouts in movie history.
Hot Fuzz
Director Edgar Wright and actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost have established themselves as the go-to guys for sharp, satirical commentary on movies and pop culture with their imaginative BBC series Spaced and their sendup of zombie movies, Shaun of the Dead. And with a resume like that, they had high expectations to meet with their take on buddy-cop action flicks, Hot Fuzz. Boy did they deliver! Utilizing the same tongue-in-cheek humor and a conspiracy theory-themed script, Hot Fuzz turns Pegg and Frost into the unlikeliest action heroes since (Good) Will Hunting brought down the CIA and became People Magazine's Sexiest Man Alive. In the film's climactic battle, Pegg and Frost grab as many guns as they can carry and waltz through the middle of their village-turned-cult headquarters, unloading buckets of lead on everyone from the pub owners to the town priest and making for a kinetic shootout sequence that would have done Michael Bay proud. It's a difficult task to walk the line between brutal and hilarious, but Hot Fuzz manages to do it with incredible panache - there are few scenes in cinema capable of amping your adrenaline levels and making you laugh all at once quite the same way this one does.
The International
The International's premise - namely that banks are surreptitiously involved in acts of terrorism - is decidedly farfetched, but it worked well enough to provide fodder for an action-packed, globe-trotting conspiracy thriller. In fact, even if the story did leave you scracthing your head a bit, one might argue that the film's exotic locales and explosive action at least merit a viewing. Architecture figures heavily into the plot, and in one sequence in particular, the Guggenheim Museum in New York plays host to one of the most interesting and exciting gunfights in recent memory. Of course, they couldn't really allow Clive Owen and his pals blast the place to bits, so director Tom Tykwer built a life-sized replica of the museum's interior for the occasion, complete with spiraling walkway. And thank goodness he did - instead of a muted assassination sequence, we get 10 minutes of pure destructive carnage that remind us fine art is a small price to pay for a bit of fun with firearms.
The Matrix
Like an enigma wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a mystery, nestled within The Matrix's mind-altering concept and moody atmosphere is quite possibly modern cinema's greatest gunfight. The movie holds many rewards for the philosophical cineaste, but for those who are content with just kung-fu and gunplay, the Wachowski present you...the lobby scene. Neo and Trinity (Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss, respectively) enter a building filled with bad guys, their trench coats lined with all manner of firearms, and proceed to decimate everyone and everything on site with bullets, judo chops, somersaults, and judicious use of awesome slo-mo. Some movies try too hard to be cool; this one justifies all its posturing and preening, and then some.
