The 25 greatest movie shootouts

The chaotic centerpiece of Michael Mann’s cops-and-robbers masterpiece is a triumph of planning, right down to the sequence’s most notable feature: the deafening sound of heavy-caliber gunfire echoing throughout downtown L.A. The plan was to sweeten the noise in postproduction, but Mann didn’t like what he heard. He wanted the sound recorded on location during the meticulously choreographed filming of the shootout. That’s the special sauce that makes it the gold standard. Luck is truly the residue of design.

“Give ‘em hell, Pike!” It’s a no-win situation for the title bandits, but there’s a glimmer of hope when William Holden gets behind that Browning M1917 and goes to work on Mapache’s men. It’s the ferocious last stand of a certain type of western outlaw, and they’re not going down without a fight. Sam Peckinpah and editor Louis Lombardo staged and cut this sequence to explosive perfection; look at the way they intersperse shots of the innocent villagers caught (and killed) in the crossfire of a meaningless battle.

Three outlaws have the drop on Sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne). He’s dropped his six-shooter and has no chance of lunging for his rifle without taking a lead shower. Fortunately, he’s got the quick-thinking Colorado (Ricky Nelson) and the fearless Feathers (Angie Dickinson) to distract the gunmen long enough for Colorado to toss the rifle to the Duke. It’s an iconic bit of gunfight business that’s been mimicked and paid homage to over the last sixty-one years.

“That makes ten!” Richard Brooks tended to make Very Serious Movies like “Blackboard Jungle”, “The Brothers Karamazov” and “In Cold Blood”, but he proved he could cut loose and churn out a hugely satisfying, largely conventional western with “The Professionals”. The most impressive sequence finds the hired gunmen setting up a killing box in a ravine to take out a party of bandits. There’s an invigorating snap to the action (which appears to have been slightly undercranked), and the shooting’s over as quickly as it began. It’s dazzling stuff.

If you’re looking for a rough approximation for how a massive shootout would play out in real life, you’ve got “Heat”. If you’re in the mood for some hyper-stylized gunplay, accept no substitutes: it’s John Woo’s “Hard Boiled”. Woo’s Peckinpah-by-way-of-Minnelli aesthetic whisks us up in a flurry of gratuitous bloodshed as a hospital becomes the setting for a rollicking shootout. Every reason you wouldn’t want bullets whizzing about willy-nilly in a hospital? Woo’s thought of it. When Chow Yun-fat winds up cradling an infant as he returns gunfire, the film turns into a ballet of wholly inconsequential violence. Despite the body count, you know Woo’s too much of a humanist to shoot a baby, so you giddily go along with it.

This list could easily include John Woo’s “Bullet in the Head”, “A Better Tomorrow II” and “Face/Off”, but we’ll leave room for other entries and close out Woo with the climactic church shootout from the film that brought him, for better or worse, to the attention of Hollywood. Some critics will argue for this cathartic gun battle over the hospital sequence in “Hard Boiled” because it’s more in keeping with the filmmaker’s operatic sensibilities. “The Killer” is a grand tragedy, one that we watch again and again in the hope that Ah Johng (Chow Yun-fat) will pull through this time.

“You didn’t see LeFors out there, did you?” “LeFors? No.” “Oh good. For a moment there I thought we were in trouble.” Why was William Goldman one of the greatest screenwriters of all time? Look no further than the closing moments of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”. He prefaces arguably the greatest blaze-of-glory finale in film history with a laugh line and turns a downer ending into a smile.

There’s a situation brewing in Keelut, Alaska. Cheeon (Julian Black Antelope), a Yupik tribesman, has barricaded himself in his home and has no intention of going peacefully. Police chief Donald Marium (James Badge Dale) doesn’t want to kill him, but a brief exchange with Cheeon confirms that there will be violence. As Marium walks away to give orders to his deputies, we see an attic door swing open in the background. Cheeon has a mounted machine gun and proceeds to cut down pretty much the entire police force. Filmmaker Jeremy Saulnier is clearly paying homage to Pike’s last final volley in “The Wild Bunch”, but, given the upgrade in efficacy, there’s a good chance Cheeon could be the last man standing.

A coked-out Tony Montana (Al Pacino) goes down blasting with his “little friend” (a Colt M161 machine gun modified with an M203 grenade launcher) in Brian De Palma’s madly operatic update of Howard Hawks’s “Scarface”. It’s a bloody outburst from an impotent monster, and you can safely enjoy the carnage because no one of value is getting hurt. De Palma lost Pacino for a few days when the actor accidentally placed his hand over a blazing hot gun barrel, which allowed the director and his visiting pal, Steven Spielberg, to cover the shootout in myriad inventive ways.

Everyone knows the Odessa Steps shootout in Chicago’s Union Station is genius, but what about the boxing in of Capone’s men on the Canadian border? De Palma isn’t one to wax poetic about westerns, which is what makes this sequence so joyous. It’s an ambush gone wrong, which forces our Chicago lawmen to literally ride in to save the day. Throw in that triumphal Ennio Morricone theme, and it’s movie heaven. “You’ve gotta die of something” indeed.

One more De Palma. The Grand Central Station shootout in “Carlito’s Way” may very well be the most suspenseful sequence in the master’s oeuvre. Before Carlito (Al Pacino) can skip Manhattan for a legit life in the Caribbean with his girlfriend Gail (Penelope Ann Miller), the gangster must run a gauntlet of payback-minded thugs. Carlito makes stealthy use of the station’s escalator system to get the drop on his would-be assassins. He picks them off one-by-one, but just when you think he’s home free, that damn Benny Blanco from the Bronx has to get his last licks in. (The first-act dive-bar gunfight is pretty spiffy as well.)

Guns and escalators redux. The mall shootout in Johnnie To’s “The Mission” is a logistical nightmare for its five-man team of mob protectors, and a visual master class for action movie junkies. Every angle is covered one way or another, with either side waiting for someone to make a false move. A janitor finally strays into the middle of the stalemate, throwing unwanted reflections that give away positions. All at once, everyone adjusts and blasts away. It’s a white-knuckler from beginning to end.

Kevin Costner might’ve won Best Picture and Director for “Dances with Wolves”, but this old-fashioned oater about two cattlemen (Costner and Robert Duvall) taking on a vicious land baron (Michael Gambon) is his finest hour as a filmmaker. The drama ambles its way to the obligatory shootout, which appears to be going bad for our heroes (including their newfound friend, Percy, a lovely swan-song performance from Michael Jeter) until the townspeople are roused to fight back against their oppressor. What an immensely satisfying film.

Moviegoers were so fixated on the looming release of “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace” in 1999 that they treated this groundbreaking sci-fi flick as a mere appetizer. Blindsided audiences were already in a frenzy by the time the film’s bravura lobby shootout arrived, which combined all of the Wachowskis’ and John Gaeta’s visual f/x tricks in one orgiastic sequence. The metal detector buzzing when Neo and Trinity pass through it hits like a starter pistol.

Travis Bickle’s quixotic quest comes to an end as he blasts his way into Sport’s seedy brothel in an effort to save teenage prȯstitute Iris. Even with the unusual flourish of Bickle’s spring-loaded holster, the sequence feels shockingly realistic. The first of Sport’s henchmen who tries to halt Travis’s progress gets his hand shot off, which, to put it mildly, was something 1970s moviegoers weren’t used to seeing. That moment feels like the next significant step in screen violence after the headshot in “Bonnie and Clyde”.

Phil Joanou’s hugely underrated gangster film stars Sean Penn as an undercover cop who infiltrates his old Hell’s Kitchen gang to take down its ruthless patriarch (Ed Harris). When Penn’s childhood best friend (Gary Oldman) gets offed by the gang’s leader, he shows up at their bar hangout and opens fire. Joanou and master cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth capture the shootout in slow motion, with Ennio Morricone’s elegiac score telling us what the movie ultimately does not show: Penn’s not walking out of here alive.

Quentin Tarantino loves his Mexican standoffs, but he’s never staged a more intricate crossfire than the tavern shootout in “Inglourious Basterds”. The film’s men-on-a-mission structure has us prepared for a massive operation that will involve most of its all-star cast, but QT throws a curveball when Lieutenant Hicox (Michael Fassbender) and his men draw the suspicions of Nazi soldiers in this tight-quarters pub. There’s only one way this can go, and it gets there so quickly there’s still a mist of blood hanging in the air after everyone’s been shot dead.

There’s never a good time to try to kill Leo O’Bannon. Johnny Caspar’s men learn this the dead way when they try to sneak up on the crime lord as he’s enjoying a nightcap and cıgar whilst listening to a phonograph of “O, Danny Boy”. Leo may be too headstrong to out-strategize his rival, but when it comes down to shooting, he’s got a decided edge. The Coens’ keen eye for detail (e.g. the wisp of smȯke through floorboards) heightens the viewer’s senses; we see as Leo does, which means there’s absolutely zero chance we’re not getting out of this in one piece.

The Northfield, Minnesota bank robbery did not go well for the James-Younger gang in real life, but it probably didn’t go down as beautifully twisted as Walter Hill shoots it in his bloody western, “The Long Riders”. It’s a scene of brutal elegance: the bungled heist is staged with precision (the highlight being a slo-mo horseback charge through the windows of a business), but the bullets bury messily into the bandits’ bodies. With a broadened MPAA rating system, Hill didn’t have to worry (too much) about landing an X-rating for violence. What’s strange is that this isn’t really a revisionist western a la “The Wild Bunch” or “Unforgiven”; it’s a classical oater that’s acutely aware of what a bullet can do to flesh.

Have you ever wondered what the “Heat” shootout would look like if the cops really didn’t care about collateral damage? It’s still difficult to comprehend that “Bad Boys II” exists. Michael Bay’s response to critics who found fault with his PG-13 depiction of “Pearl Harbor” was to go full bore with the R-rated mayhem in this mega-budget sequel to his debut feature. The sequence in question starts off with gangsters and cops exchanging fire on a spiral parking garage ramp and turns into a war zone in the middle of a downtown Miami street. We go from “Heat” to “Black Hawk Down” in a matter of seconds, and it is glorious.

John Carpenter’s urban riff on “Rio Bravo” shifts into a higher gear when the gang that’s surrounded the skeleton crew squad house opens fire. Operating on an extremely low budget, Carpenter sets squibs all over the interior. It’s the quietest hail of gunfire you’ll ever see; paperwork pop-pop-pops into the air as our heroes take cover. You might know why it’s being shot this way, but Carpenter and his cast sell the danger.

Curtis Hanson’s “L.A. Confidential” runs a hefty 138 minutes, but if you know James Ellroy’s sprawling novel, you realize the movie is terse by comparison. This contrast in styles couldn’t be more evident than in the climactic shootout at the Victory Motel. In the novel, the action is secondary to the resolution of Exley’s story (i.e. he learns to play the institutional game, and has enough on Dudley Smith to build a career). In the movie, it’s practically a western; Exley and Bud gun down most of their enemies in rousing fashion until Smith makes the mistake of giving Exley his back.

If you happened to be at the Alamo Drafthouse in December of 2009, you might rate Hit Girl’s hallway shootout with D’Amico’s bodyguards a little higher than most – because nothing gets the blood pumping like the build into Slash’s epic guitar solo at the end of “November Rain”. This was the music cue used in test screenings for Matthew Vaughn’s film, and it was divine in its implementation. The scene is still a crackerjack piece of gunplay and richly deserves its place on this list, but there exists a version that would blow your mind.

Some might question the ethics of setting a climactic shootout in the Ambassador Hotel given its history with tragic gunplay, but Tony Scott’s adaptation of Quentin Tarantino’s “Badlands”-on-cocaine crime story is all about flouting good taste. This shoot-‘em-up scene was so effective, Scott used it again at the end of his also-excellent “Enemy of the State” (sans cameo from Val Kilmer as Elvis Presley).

Johnnie To’s mob actioner lacks the clarity of his best work, but all is forgiven in the ludicrously protracted slo-mo shootout that finds just about every single pivotal member of the story shooting the stuffing out of one another as a can of Red Bull sails in the air. By the time it hits the floor, everyone is dead or bleeding out. There’s a perverse bit of honor in this act. In fact, the themes are so shopworn for To you can’t help but feel he’s engaging in self-parody. If so, the man’s earned a right to make his “Raising Cain”.