What a perfect ending to a great movie, feathers and all. TR, my all time favorite movie. Not to hi-jack, but the Drexl scene/picking up the suitcase was spectacular.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the final shoot-out from The Wild Bunch yet.....epic carnage! Or The Outlaw Josey Wales.....
Open Range with Costner and Duvall. I've never heard a more realistic sound affect for those big caliber guns. You can feel the punch.
Agreed with everybody voting for Heat and Saving Private Ryan. I also liked Tom Cruise in Collateral, the nightclub scene was pretty good. Not a really big Cruise fan but he was good in that movie and also as Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder.
I forgot...the scene in Pulp Fiction where Jules (Sam Jackson) recites an impassioned soliloquy from the Bible, blows his target away, is then fired on by a guy who misses all six shots from ten feet. In the last scene of the movie, he announces to Vincent (Travolta) that as a result of this miraculous escape from death and subsequent spiritual awakening, he's going to give up being a hitman and "walk the earth." That's one I need to watch again.
Its nice to see so many people saying HEAT. Its especially cool because it was filmed before Hollywood started doing all the gunfights CGI
Any gunfight at the OK Corral pretty much blows it out of the water. The history is all that. Even Clint would be proud to have been there. Who do you want to be?
Heat. I went back and saw it 3x in the theater - I remember the volume at the cinema was so loud the gunfire sounded real. It has 3 scenes that are absolutely epic - the heist/shootout, the cafe, the ending.
HEAT, as noted justifiably several times, is in a league of it's own when it comes to cinematic gunfights, and will likely remain untouchable. The elements that came together perfectly to make that scene so powerful are not easily duplicated. Not to mention, there are two other gunfights in the movie, at the armored car robbery and drive in, that on their own rival anything else out there. One movie not mentioned is "Way of the Gun", a vastly underrated action flick starring some substantial talent. First class gun handling like HEAT, nearly as intense but not quite as realistic. Michael Mann's own "Collateral" features Tom Cruise doing Yeoman's work as a top notch hired killer, but for the ending this movie would be perfect. Cruise's work perfecting the mugging scene is obvious and rewarding. "Saving Private Ryan" indeed deserves mention, for the spectactular audio and unflinching realism of it's combat scenes. "Ronin" is another movie that often comes up in "best gunfight" discussions, with solid but to me uninspired gun handling and shootouts. "Matrix", the first one, is amazing to watch. The hotel lobby scene and helicopter rescue are phenomenal, and perhaps the ultimate in fantasy gunfights.
One of my favorite scenes of all time. Stunning to watch, one of the best action sequences on film. Another vastly underrated movie.