Best Movie Shootouts of All Time — Locked, Loaded & Ranked

One of the most successful action franchises in movie history, the Fast and Furious films have made a name for themselves through big, ridiculous set pieces. The Favela shootout, however, is one of the more understated entries — it’s a relatively straightforward gunfight. 

What makes it so great is its succinct evolution of character relationships. Up until this point, the Rock’s Luke Hobbs has been Dom and the family’s biggest foe. Here, he’s been bested and looks as though he’s at the end of his rope, until Dom and crew show up and save him.

Dom extending his burly arm to Hobbs’ burly arm is instantly iconic and solidifies the Rock’s addition to the F&F family.

While the Scarface shootout sequence is far more famous, it is the final sequence in Carlito’s Way that provides the best Pacino/De Palma shootout.

Brian De Palma uses the Grand Central location to heighten the gun battle between Carlito and his hunters. Perhaps the best example of this is when Carlito is forced to shoot his way off an escalator as commuters shriek and run for cover. We all have our crazy Grand Central story.

Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece is a practice in restraint. Most of Taxi Driver is set to a simmer, though the audience knows that at some point it will escalate to a rolling boil. This boil doesn’t come until the film’s very end, when its protagonist Travis Bickle marches up the stairs of a brothel to rescue a child prostitute. The sequence is a slow death knell; each bullet fired is vividly and devastatingly portrayed upon impact. It’s a vigilante shootout stripped of any Hollywood heroism.

The porch shootout in The Wild Bunch is a chaotic bloodbath, and that’s what makes it great. Shots of guns firing and gore flying speed by our eyes before we can really make sense of them.

It’s a hyper-stylized Western shootout that has had a clear influence on modern shootout masters like Quentin Tarantino and John Woo.

L.A. Confidential feels like a movie out of time — though made in 1997, it has all the trappings of a Film Noir from the Golden Age of Hollywood. This old-fashioned and deliberate pacing allows for a methodical and gripping shootout. Our heroes are woefully outnumbered, but through smart blocking and the simple communication of glances, they come out on top, and we believe it.

According to the characters in this film, this is technically a “shoot off,” but we’ll make an exception. The ultimate shootout of Hot Fuzz contains all the elements that make Edgar Wright movies great: it’s tightly edited, filled with nods to genre tropes, and refreshingly original.

The sequence probably also holds a record for the lowest kills-to-shots-fired ratio (zero), proving a shootout doesn’t need to be filled with gore to be enormously satisfying.

Like Fast Five, what makes the bank shootout in Point Break so great is not so much the action but the character revelations within it. The film is essentially a star-crossed love story between Keanu Reeves’ Johnny Utah and Patrick Swayze’s Bodhi, and this shootout marks a point-of-no-return for both characters.

Probably the quietest shootout on the list, the firefight in the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is more horror than action. Real-life boogeyman Anton moves with a cold precision that is so intimidating, it doesn’t seem like he’d be stopped even if Llewelyn did shoot him.

The scene is expertly paced and beautifully shot, understated yet profound. It’s Coen Brothers through and through.

De Palma is a master of the shootout, and the stairway sequence in The Untouchables is his crowning achievement. 

Centered around a baby carriage rolling down a short set of stairs, the scene is a testament to the power of film editing. In real time, this moment wouldn’t last more than five seconds, but through slow-motion, cross-cutting and close-ups, the sequence is stretched into two minutes that feel like two hours. It serves as an unforgettable lesson: check to make sure the room is clear of babies before you engage in a shootout.

Keanu Reeves has been in his fair share of movie shootouts (one more still to come on this list), and John Wick threw him into yet another one. And another. And another.

The Red Circle Club shootout is the best of them – outdoing itself with more and more over-the-top set decoration and gun tricks as the scene progresses. Reeves trained on a shooting range for the role, and it shows. The cinematography is clean and clear, letting us take in each stunt in all its glory.

Have we mentioned Keanu Reeves yet? Ah, then let’s focus on the groundbreaking work of the Wachowski sisters. By 1999, movie audiences were well acquainted with shootouts, but no one had seen one quite like the one in The Matrix.

The Wachowskis pulled from martial art flicks, science fiction, and shoot-em-ups to create jaw-dropping action set pieces, none better than the lobby shootout. Their innovative approach completely changed how action blockbusters looked, and raised the bar for any shootout to follow.

John Woo is the godfather of the modern shootout, influencing everyone from the Wachowskis to Tarantino, and the hospital shootout from Hard Boiled is probably his finest. 

It takes its time while also maintaining consistent blood-pumping action. It’s all clearly depicted and technically spectacular (a three-minute oner during an intricately choreographed action sequence? How?). Shootouts don’t get much better than this.

While Hard Boiled provides the perfect shootout direction, Butch Cassidy provides the perfect writing. The end of the classic film is beautifully bittersweet, a testament to friendship and believing in an impossible dream. While the shootout itself is fun, it’s that indelible final freeze frame that cements it as an all-time great moment in cinema. 

The shootout doesn’t get better than it does in Heat. So intensely researched that Val Kilmer’s reloading technique is shown in basic training, so committed to realism that the gunshot sound effects were recorded on location, director Michael Mann created the ideal cinematic gunfight.

But it’s not just its realism that gets Heat the top spot. The performances in the shootout are exquisite: we see the pain in Neil’s eyes when he realizes it’s hit the fan; we see the desperate resolve of Vincent to finally get these guys. These are characters at the top of their respective fields operating at full velocity. This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. 

up next

How to Direct a Mexican Standoff

Now that you’ve got your primer in shootouts, it’s time to take a look at another classic feature of action movies: the Mexican Standoff. We'll cover how to direct these moments of tense pre-action by looking at examples from Tarantino, John Woo and Taylor Sheridan.

Up Next: Mexican Standoffs →