The end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Fabulous movie with a great showdown at the end between Butch and Sundance against the entire Bolivian Army. Can’t get any better than that!
I can’t believe that Heat hasn’t been mentioned yet. The bank robbery and escape scenes kick absolute ass, especially when it’s played on DVD with digital surround sound!
Way of the Gun also gets my vote. Even the movie was…different, shall we say, the gun scenes (of which there are many) are very high quality.
Three guys with guns and one name written on a rock. Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach as, respectively, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
I liked the shootout between Leon and the cops in The Professional.
My vote is for Unforgiven. Through the entire movie, you knew there would be a showdown. So, it had to be good. And, when our dark hero finally arrives at the bar, the fear instilled in everyone there, including the evil and previously unflinchable sheriff, seemed so real. The shootout was tremendous, but it also meant something. It was Clint, returning to his former dark persona, giving you a glimpse at the man who used to drink and shoot up a place for much less nobler purposes.
A shootout doesn’t have to be prolonged and over-produced to be effective. The scene didn’t waste a shot. I thought this was the best Clint Eastwood movie I’ve ever seen. It was the thinking man’s Clint. In contrast, I was bored by Face Off, and I refused to watch all of From Dusk Til Dawn, which could have been a good movie if it hadn’t turned into a vampire kill-a-thon for lack of an original ending.
I also enjoyed the finale to Young Guns quite a bit.
It’s a helluva thing to kill a man. You take away everything he has and everything he will be.
–Clint Eastwood, Unforgiven.
(paraphrased)
The Wild Bunch shootout deserves another mentioning.
A shootout that I thought was very realistic (although I don’t have actual experience with firefights) was the end of Soylent Green. There were not a ton of shots fired. It involves several people chasing Charlton Heston’s character, and he is often shooting just to keep people away from him. No deadly accurate shots; for the ones that did hit there seemed at least an element of luck. In all, it was pretty boring by Hollywood standards.
I don’t know how The Professional slipt my mind. Some great stuff in there.
Also, I just saw the full-version (with the 24 minutes that had been taken out for North American release back in) and it’s much better, even though it was great to begin with. I don’t know why they cut the scenes that they did.
Yeah, I like the way Clint turns from “this nice old guy was a ruthless gunslinger?!” to the scariest Mo Fu that town had ever seen.
You just shot an unarmed man!
–Little Bill(Gene Hackman)
Well, he should have armed himself if he was goin’ to use my friend to decorate his saloon.
–Clint Eastwood, Unforgiven.
Speaking of Eastwood, I’m surprised no one has mentioned the “Feel lucky punk?” seen from the Dirty Hairy movies. Although it was more of a ‘Clint points his gun/bad guy craps himself’ than a shotout.
I also like that scene in ‘The Outlaw josie Wales’ (I think, maybe it was ‘A Fistfull of Dollars’) where he’s carying bags of groceries and faces off against 5 Union soldiers.
For anybody who is into guns and has not seen this, you must. The way of the gun has the greatest gunfight scenes ever! It should, however, only be viewed in a really loud theater, or with a really loud surround system. You just won’t get the full effect otherwise. The sounds were great, the actors really looked like they knew what they were doing…AND THEY ACTUALLY HAD TO STOP AND RELOAD!!. You even occasionally see them pulling the clips out of the guns and checking to see how many rounds are left after ducking behind something. Truely great film.
Man oh man, did I love Unforgiven. “Any man don’t wanna get killed, better move on out the back.” Pure ice.
On John Woo: as I understand it, he goes out of his way to make his gun battles cartoonish and unrealistic. So, no reloading, hero and villain don’t get hit until the final showdown, etc. It does keep the tension level high, though, and makes Hard Boiled, IMHO, the best gun film ever.
I’ll drop in a classic for y’all: Robin Hood (Errol Flynn) versus Sir Guy of Gisborne (Basil Rathbone) in The Adventures of Robin Hood. If you ever get a chance to see Errol Flynn in a cinematic sword duel, you’re in for a treat; that man could really swing a blade. Flynn and Rathbone have another great duel in Captain Blood; I don’t know if they had any other face-offs.
It would be criminal not to mention Steve McQueen and his double-aught spray-fest in The Getaway, another Peckinpah gem.
In fact, it seems as if Peckinpah couldn’t make a film without a super-cool gunfight (um, I haven’t seen Convoy). Check out Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (with 5’3" Warren Oates walkin’ tall), Cross of Iron (with a bonus penis biting scene), and, although it really has only one poorly handled shotgun, Straw Dogs.
Just as a film in general, Way of the Gun was the second best film I saw last year. It’s really good, and you won’t see me say things like that very often. I’m glad lots of other folks have now seen it; for awhile I thought I was the only one.
What about “The Long Riders” when they were trying to ride out of that town with bullets, blood and horses going everywhere. Especially the slow motion when the bullets hit and blood splashes out and they go uugghh(well you know I mean.)
Heck, ya don’t need to have guns to have a good showdown.
One of my favorites is the duel between Luke and Darth in The Empire Strikes Back.
I’m not ashamed to admit I liked all of these movies for their fight scenes:
Die Hard 1 & 2. Willis’s character is the best I’ve seen showing himself in pain. Not I’ve-got-a-bullet-in-my-shoulder-and-it-stings-a-bit, but rolling-on-the-floor-clutching-my-gut-“Ow, f***, that HURTS!”
Robocop had good shooting scenes. Special to me coz it’s the first movie that showed blood and bits of hamburger flying out of bullet wounds. (Thank you, Mister Verhoeven.)
Talk of sword-fight scenes and no-one mentions “Highlander” OR “The Princess Bride”? or “Gladiator”?
What about machine-to-machine shoot-outs? The final battle scene in “The Hunt for Red October” is fantastic - a dogfight between submarines!
Or the dogfight scenes in “Star Wars”? The Imperial assault on Hoth?
I’m going back to the basics here and revealing my inherent geek-ness, but I must single out “Raiders of the Lost Ark”: The shoot-out in Marion’s bar. The fist-fight at the flying-wing. How Indy kicked all the Nazis off that truck.
If we expand this to include fist-fights, I’d have to nominate Martin Blank and the Basque Ghoul LaPoubelle in Grosse Pointe Blank. With bonus points for using The English Beat’s Mirror in the Bathroom in the background.
Grosse Point Blank? 
Not my vote, but I love the flick.
Shootouts…gotta be another vote for True Romance, my all time favorite movie, and then Heat, which I can’t believe hasn’t shown up yet. The end shootout is so damn impressive IMO…wow.
How about the shootout at the end of State of Grace? I’ve always liked that one.
Another vote for The Wild Bunch.
How about the shootout at the end of Taxi Driver, I can remember my girlfriend saying “why, why did they have to show that?” with this discusted look on her face.
Here’s another vote for the greatest - The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.
For maybe the next bet, try Kurosawa’s Sanjuro. The duel at the end is the minimalistic essense of all that a duel is about.
However, now that I think about it, Barry Lyndon’s duel sequence is unparalleled. Perhaps that is the best…
Unforgiven has been mentioned a few times, but everybody seems to be keying on the big shootout at the end. It’s a helluva scene, but what about the earlier scene where they shoot Davey Bunting, the younger of the two fellas what cut up the whore? Sure, it’s more of a shoot at than a shootout, but it’s really effective in showing the horror and drama involved in killing another human being (and even manages a few nervous, guilty chuckles in the process). The fact that Davey apparently was a generally good kid who earlier had simply found himself in a bad situation without the moral strength to oppose Quick Mike’s aggression, and who had even made a feeble attempt at recompense, made his slow, agonizing death even more horrifying. (Diagram that sentence!)
Then again, the cold brutality and lack of romanticizing is also what made the final shootout so effective.