The current nominees are:
Heat
Saving Private Ryan
Proof of Life
Black Hawk Down
Honestly, I can’t think of anything else at the moment that depicts trained combatants doing their jobs.
What have I forgotten about, and who is the winner?
Oh, you want something “realistic”!
Because from the perspective of a sheer glorification of well-choreographed, expertly staged orgy of gunplay, Hard Boiled kicks all of their butts.
Ronin?
And Hard Boiled is like a live-action video game. I really dig the boss at the end of the Hospital stage where you have to rescue all the babies.
Of David Mamet films, I like the dockside shootout in Heist; you have Gene Hackman and Delroy Lindo on one side, a bunch of henchmen on the other, all cowering behind barrels and crates, popping out to wildly shoot at each other but actually more fearful of being hit than of making a kill shot, and Danny DeVito spinning around in the middle yelling at both sides, “Stop! Stop shooting! Stop!”
Spartan (a vastly underrated film) also had uniformly good gun handling technique and a couple of realistic firefights.
The downtown L.A. post-heist gun battle in Heat pretty accurately replicated the effects of the 1980 Norco shootout, except for the over the top heroic sniper action by Pacino which was inserted just to demonstrate that he wasn’t quite as much of a sociopath as DeNiro.
Talking about DeNiro, the bloody and brutal ultimate shootout in Taxi Driver is probably as close as it gets to replicating the sense and effect of a gunfight on film. The utter chaos and confusion, the shock, the blood, the horrible disfigurement is more like a gunfight than anything seen in a Hollywood actioneer.
As a tangent to the o.p., one of the best on screen knife fights I’ve seen was in Quantum of Solace, where Mr. Slate attacks Bond. No music track, no facing off and posturing, no fancy block-grab-punch aikido moves; just two guys ripping away at each other with knives, scissors, broken glass, shoes, anything at hand to just survive another second.
Stranger
I saw Shoot 'Em Up on HBO a few months ago. There was some pretty mind-bending gunplay in that.
I was quite impressed by the war scene of Children of men.
I stopped to post just that, except that it is realistic. I can’t imagine Chow Yun Fat not being able to do that in real life, I just can’t 
I have bever been to war, I will never be to war, yet somehow that part of the film seemed just “right” somehow. Saying that, the entire thing to me felt grimly realistic for the world they conceived of.
I would say the final sequence in Children of Men is the best action scene in a decade, but the gun combat itself wasn’t particularly notable.
Heat springs to mind as good gunplay. I get the movies Proof of Life and Tears of the Sun confused because I saw them nearly at the same time and they’re both forgettable, but one of them had very authentic feeling special ops type small unit combat.
Blackhawk down is excellent.
All of the above that I’ve seen are great choices, and I need to really rent “Spartan” (and “Taxi Driver”, I’m ashamed to say.) I’ll throw into the mix an obscure 1982 U.K. movie, “The Final Option” (also known as “Who Dares Wins”). The acting is wooden, and the politics are a product of their time, but that’s not what you’re renting this for. The movie is basically a fictionalized retelling of the Special Air Service storming the Iranian Embassy in 1980, with assorted kill-house sequences, breaching charges, balaclavas, etc… I need to re-see it, but at the time, I thought it wasn’t half-bad. This was, of course, before I saw movies such as “Platoon”, “Saving Private Ryan”, and “Heat” which ratcheted up the realism, so maybe my opinion would change if I saw it again.
This clip from “Miami Vice”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Q2Il86-38A is a lot of fun. Not very “realistic” per se—cars generally don’t explode when shot with shotguns, even a SPAS-12…, and gunshot victims don’t fly back six feet when hit. Just watch how fast Jim Zubiena, a former IPSC high level competitor, is able to move.
In that same vein, this scene from “Collateral” is quite good and very cool. (FF to the :50 mark for the sequence.) Never could figure out why Vincent didn’t just shoot them from cover with his suppressed pistol, but that wouldn’t have been near as cool, I suppose.
I confess to a fondness for the set-pieces in the movie “Sniper”: they look cool, even as I suspect they’re about as realistic as “Shoot 'Em Up.” Haven’t seen it, but “The Way of the Gun” gets a lot of love from various firearms message boards. “We Were Soldiers” is another movie I haven’t seen that is supposed to have gotten a lot of the details and feel right. Still waiting for a movie adaptation of “Fields of Fire” and I’m surprised Webb didn’t option it back in the late 80’s when all of those other Vietnam movies were being made.
Will there eventually be a movie where rifle shooters have to dope wind, or am I expecting too much from Hollywood?
Although I haven’t seen it in a while, I seem to recall that True Romance had outstanding gunfight scenes.
Proof of Life’s final combat sequence was very realistic, down to the almost-never-seen-in-movies REALISTIC depiction of what a grenade explosion is actually like.
Heat had the best gun handling I’ve seen, down to the using the bolt release catch when reloading rather than pulling back on the charging handle.
Open Range had perhaps the best sound in a gunfight.
That’s the one I was going to mention. I watched last night on HBO and it is the most ridiculous movie you will ever see, and I’m sure anybody who has ever posted grain-counts and stopping power statistics here would probably have a stroke trying to suspend their disbelief … but it’s just so over the top goofy that it works.
Way of the Gun. Hands down.
It’s still on my DVR, waiting to be watched, but I’ve heard praise for The Way of the Gun for its realistic gun-handling. Here’s a clip of some sample tactics: “Move - Moving”
I came in here to post this. I’d like to see Alfonso Cuarón do an actual war movie. He did an excellent job.
I haven’t seen the film, but this clip seems to be more Hollywood drama than ‘realistic’. Assuming the “gangsters” would gain some on killing the “cops” (suit guys, black and white guy), and the “cops” would gain some on killing the “gangsters” (no suits, both white), and assuming they are able to kill, I don’t get why the gangster behind the backs of the cops don’t shoot at 0:22 for instance, when the cops did not drops their guns, or for that matter at 1:35; or why the gangster who realeased the girl didn’t shoot at the black cop at 1:52 (when the white cop had his back to the other gangster, which reminds me that the other gangster easily would’ve been able to shoot him, the second after, presumably the white guy had been shot), or why the black cop didn’t fire at 1:59 when one of the gangsters had his back on the cops, or why one cop didn’t open suppressive fire at 2:08 while the other shot the gangster who turned his back, etc.
But what do I know, I’ve never been in a firefight.
From what I understand, the guys in the suits aren’t cops, but paid bodyguards, hired by a very wealthy man with criminal ties to protect the surrogate mother of his child. The object of the “gangsters” was to kidnap her. That may change your analysis somewhat.
Yeah, I’ve never been in a firefight either, but I always question those standoffs where 2 people or 2 teams have their guns pointed at each other. ISTM the best move in that case is always to shoot first - if you let the other guy shoot first, you’re sure to take a bullet. If you shoot first, and hit him, you may escape unscathed. And certainly, if you ever get any sort of advantage, even for a second, you have to shoot the other guy.
The Wild Bunch - “Bullet time” scene before there was such a thing.