Shootouts and gunfights are a rich cinematic tradition. Classic Westerns, crime movies, and war films have long hinged their climactic action beats on bloody gun battles between their heroes and the forces that oppose them. And they've only become more popular in the decades since. Over the years, shoot 'em up set-pieces have grown and evolved along with film technology and audience tastes, translating to new genres and popping up in just about every kind of movie you can think of, from superhero actioners to meta-comedies and awards contenders.

With Ben Wheatley's riotous Free Fire arriving in theaters this weekend, which is essentially a feature-length shootout that will undoubtedly end up a future iteration of this list, the Collider staff rounded up our favorite movie shootouts to get in the ballistic spirit. A couple house cleaning notes of interest. We kept our selection to one per director. Filmmakers like Sam Peckinpah, Quentin Tarantino, Michael Mann, and John Woo have proven themselves masters of the shootout on so many occasions each could fill a list of their own. We love and admire their repeated excellence, but we also wanted to cast a wider net and highlight more films. Another important note is that this is a list of shootouts, not duels or Mexican standoffs. Though those motifs pop up, these selections are based on the thrill of action rather than the tension of inaction.

Without further ado, check out our picks for the best movie shootouts below and sound off in the comments with your favorites.

The Long Riders (1980)

Walter Hill has famously said that every film of his is a Western. It’s easy to see how the Wild West template fit the band of outlaws moving about a city in The Warriors and a down on his luck journeyman bare-knuckle fighter settling into a town to make some money in Hard Times but The Long Riders was his only full-fledged Western until his later career exploded with Western work (Geronimo, Last Man Standing, Wild Bill and an episode of Deadwood).

The Long Riders is a chronicle of the Younger-James gang of outlaw brothers at the point where they were all parting ways as the dead-or-alive bounties became too rich for them to continue to ride side by side. Hill cast many real-life brothers in the roles (Stacy Keach and James Keach are Frank James and Jesse James and David Carradine, Keith Carradine, and Bob Carradine make up the Younger brothers) and this gives the film a natural ease of brotherhood familiarity. It also enhances the early gem of a shootout where brothers are watching actual brothers explode with blood. The big bank robbery shootout feels very similar to the first shootout in The Wild Bunch, except Hill is able to use more blood in slow motion than Sam Peckinpah ever dreamed of. There’s also a slow-mo shot of horses jumping through glass! Advice: come for the shootout but stay for the amazing handkerchief-in-mouth knife fight between James Remar and Keith Carradine. — Brian Formo

Shoot 'em Up (2007)

It's not very often that your run-of-the-mill action movie opens with a bang-bang, shoot-em-up scene, but for a movie titled Shoot 'Em Up, it's kind of a must-have. Though just deep enough on story to set things up for the rest of the runtime, this opening sequence is absolutely dripping with style. That style might not be to everyone's liking, but it's style nonetheless.

You know exactly what kind of bonkers action flick you're in for when Smith (Clive Owen) kills a man with a carrot. Yeah. Granted, the man was a violent type who was about to cut a baby from the womb of a terrified woman, so you knew he was going to meet his maker, but this kill scene remains one of the best uses of vegetables as a weapon ever. Not satisfied with stopping there, the aforementioned shootout unfolds, showing off Smith's uncanny marksmanship and ability to use his environment to his advantage. It's just a tease of the craziness that's to come, but it's one hell of a start. - Dave Trumbore

Macgruber (2010)

macgruber-shootout
Image via Universal Pictures

So maybe MacGruber doesn’t have the most stylish or even impressive shootout sequence on this list, but boy is it funny. The film subverts traditional action movie standards by presenting a hero who favors ripping people’s throats out over using guns, but when Will Forte’s MacGruber is handed a semi-automatic, all hell breaks loose. As crafted by director Jorma Taccone it’s a hilarious sequence in which not a single bullet makes contact, and Forte goes for broke with the most ridiculous faces ever seen from an action hero. Indeed, this twist on the action hero format is one of the reasons MacGruber stands out (that and its sheer comedic brilliance), and this shootout scene in particular is unlike any other put to film in that it zero’s in on the title character’s total incompetence. – Adam Chitwood

The Way of the Gun (2000)

You would be forgiven for either forgetting or, more likely, having never seen The Way of the Gun, the oddball early aughts actioner that starred Benicio Del Toro and Ryan Phillippe as two ruthless criminals who get in over their head when they kidnap the wrong woman. It's an offbeat film with some narrative missteps, but as McQuarrie has proved with Jack Reacher and Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, he is a filmmaker who knows his way around action. As the title suggests, The Way of the Gun packs a bounty of fantastic action set-pieces, but the climactic final shootout is an unforgettable, impossibly tense sequence that keeps you so far on the edge of your seat it's like you've got spikes in your back. McQuarrie doesn't dress up the violence as his antiheroes charge headfirst into an ambush, and he amps up the stakes by setting the whole blowout against the backdrop of a bloody c-section where a doctor is desperately trying to save a woman and her baby. It's visceral action, cleanly shot with a steady hand. McQuarrie translates an impeccable sense of geography and makes every bullet count in a battle where you better watch your toes when you take cover around the corner. -- Haleigh Foutch

The Wild Bunch (1969)

While the final shootout may appear relatively tame to modern audiences, in 1969, it was a bloodbath with Sam Peckinpah’s western diving into levels of violence rarely seen in American cinema.  The shootout is a cacophony, but it’s not really meant to entertain.  If anything, it’s a deconstruction of the fun westerns provide and it throws the viewer into chaos and bloodshed.  While we occasionally keep coming to our main characters, Peckinpah doesn’t linger on a single shot for any length of time, throwing us headlong into the bloody madness unfolding.  The Battle of Bloody Porch is constantly disorienting, never titillating the audience but rather challenging our preconceived notions of the genre. – Matt Goldberg

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

Superheroes and shootouts don't seem like they should go together, it's almost too pedestrian, but the military heritage of Captain America lays the groundwork for The Winter Soldier's tactical battle on a crowded city highway. Chris Evans' Cap, Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow, and Anthony Mackie's Falcon put their military and mercenary training to use when they square off against the mechanically enhanced super soldier and his team of gunmen. We've seen this team battle apocalyptic odds, but the intimacy and relatability of the on-the-ground combat give The Winter Soldier an edge that can feel lacking in the more spectacle-oriented Avenger sagas. Joe and Anthony Russo proved their skill for shootouts when they turned Community's paintball episode into a bonafide action film in miniature, and they bring that skill here, directing with a sharp eye for earth-bound action. The sequence mixes in hand-to-hand combat and superhuman feats, but it never loses a grounded sense of realism, even in the moments of heroic fantasy. -- Haleigh Foutch

Dillinger (1973)

Warren Oates is the unsung king of the neo-Western shootout. After manning the machine gun during the epic end of The Wild Bunch, Oates graduated to leading man shootout status in both Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and John MiliusDillenger. Oates was perfect for a neo-Western because he wasn’t traditionally handsome, he looked and acted a little squirrely. And he frequently played drifters and his expressions and composure always added to that drifter story. He looked and talked like a man who had left a lot of shit behind in a previous life.

Though Oates fired many bullets in his day, it’s Dillinger that gets the nod here because the hideaway house gets shot all to hell. There are tommy guns, grenades, a kiss for good luck, a woman with a shotgun protecting her man leading to a more intimate confrontation apart from the massive one—everything you need for a great standoff. — Brian Formo

Hot Fuzz (2007)

Hot Fuzz isn't a comedy movie with action or an action movie with comedy, it's a true action-comedy hybrid of the rarest order. Edgar Wright layers laughs and action with unique skill, fulfilling both genres in a single beat, and that talent is never more clearly displayed than when Simon Pegg's Nicholas Angel and Nick Frost's Danny Butterman ride in to clean up their town once and for all. Wright pays tribute to the greatest trademarks of film shootouts with glee, from classic westerns to the cinematic stylings Michael Bay, but never for a second loses the creative command that makes Hot Fuzz a film that could only be made by him. -- Haleigh Foutch

Django Unchained (2012)

So yeah, a Quentin Tarantino movie had to land on this list. While Tarantino mastered the Mexican Standoff misdirect with Reservoir Dogs, it wasn’t until Django Unchained that he really went all-in on an extended, bloody, gory, oh-so-Tarantino-y movie shootout. But it’s not just the staging and execution of the shootout at Candyland that makes it so memorable—it’s also cathartic. The action comes after two hours of watching Leonardo DiCaprio’s Calvin Candie and his cohorts be absolutely vile, disgusting human beings, torturing their slaves both mentally and physically. Up until now, Django has had to keep his cool and stay under cover to save his wife’s life, but once Christoph Waltz’s Dr. Schultz pops and shoots Candie, the gloves come off. It’s a tremendously satisfying release, laden with Tarantino’s signature dialogue and some smart subversion of expectations. And yes, it’s very, very bloody. – Adam Chitwood

L.A. Confidential (1997)

Despite being made in the late nineties, Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential is an old-fashioned noir. Set in the seedy streets of 1920's Los Angeles, the film follows three officers serving in the corrupt law enforcement, each embracing or rejecting the criminality that surrounds them with their own moral code (or lack there of). The final set-piece finds Russell Crowe's Bud White and Guy Pearce's Lt. Ed Exley ambushed by a team of corrupt cops, outgunned and outmanned, but never outwitted. Hanson smartly avoids the hail of bullets route, making every shot and the moments between them count for all their worth. Hanson plays with concepts of high ground and low ground, letting his heroes win the day with their tactical smarts as much as their aim. It's a clean and concise action beat that provides a well-earned victory worth cheering for. -- Haleigh Foutch

Assassins (1995)

If you're going to have a movie about a pair of dueling assassins, you'd better have some epic shootout scenes. Assassins certainly does, but because so many famous movie shootouts have come before it, Donner had to change things up a little. Or a lot.

You might think the idea of competing assassins would be enough to carry tension through a movie, and you'd be right for the most part; some of the best scenes in this flick come from the cat-and-mouse game between Sylvester Stallone's Robert Rath and Antonio Banderas' Miguel Bain. This cemetery shootout, however, is pure craziness. Their mark is in attendance, but the character the assassins choose to play couldn't be more different: Rath, up close and personal to the grieving family, dons a pair of sunglasses and sports a ridiculous cast while Bain moonlights as a maintenance man/gravedigger a respectable distance from the proceedings. Though Bain shoots first, using a high-powered rifle with a Hollywood silencer, Rath gets style points for concealing his own weapon within the cast. Once the first shots are fired, all hell breaks loose in a cemetery chase that includes busted headstones, indecipherable one-liners, and the Metro Police. It's glorious.  - Dave Trumbore

Hell or High Water (2016)

The most recent entry on this list, David McKenzie's Hell or High Water is a neo-western for an age where the cowboy is all but extinct. The film stars Chris Pine and Ben Foster as a pair of everyman brothers in West Texas, where they devise a plan to steal from the banks in order to keep the banks from taking their family land. As these things tend to do, it all goes to pot in a hurry, leading to a climactic standoff that pits the older, more unhinged brother against full brunt of the police force. It's a breathless exercise in tension and realism. Screenwriter Taylor Sheridan crafted a tight, shrewd script that makes you care about the men on either end of the firefight, and when the bodies start dropping there's no titillation to be found in the violence, just a somber, unflinching reflection on our fragile tether to life and the capriciousness of death. -- Haleigh Foutch

True Romance (1993)

Tony Scott's Tarantino-scripted crime drama is a whirlwind of lust and violence that creates combustible chemistry out of the the best cinematic trademarks of both filmmakers. On the storytelling end, True Romance is an earnest, blazing love story spiced up with Tarantino's signature snappy dialogue and taste for the grimy criminal underworld. On the directorial end, Scott turns stylish swagger into a sort of glam trash opera with bullets instead of baritones. Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette swing for the fences as Clarence and Alabama, two full-tilt weirdos in the thick of a whirlwind, red-blooded romance when they accidentally steal of a suitcase full of cocaine and end up in the shit list of a vicious mob boss. First True Romance makes us fall in love with the winsome pair, then it puts them in the thick of heavy crossfire between the mob and the police. Clarence and Alabama aren't even active player in the shootout, and it's instantly clear how thoroughly they're in over their head. You sit there willing the pair to safety, and while the action itself is grand spectacle, but it's the uncommon amount of heart and yes, romance, that makes this one such a doozy. -- Haleigh Foutch

The Untouchables (1987)

Brian De Palma is no stranger to on-screen carnage, and while the savagery of the climactic gun battle in his Scarface remake is arguably more iconic, the famous Union station shootout in The Untouchables is flat out beautiful for its intricate choreography, searing tension, and emotional thrust. De Palma is fluent in the language of cinematic violence and here he creates a sort of poem of queasy dread, riffing on Battleship Potemkin's seminal Odessa Steps sequence to create suffocating tension. As Kevin Costner's detective Elliot Ness waits for the first hammer to drop, a woman enters the scene, trying to get her baby carriage up the long tall steps of the train station. Ness tries to help her clear the scene in time, every step toward the top ratcheting the anxiety, like those final clicks at the top of a roller coaster. When the first gun is drawn and the plunge begins, and De Palma puts your stomach in your throat as the carriage falls down the steps in the midst of a mob shootout. It's an artful manipulation of primal fears with the stamp of De Palma's signature choking unease. -- Haleigh Foutch

The Matrix (1999)

The Matrix changed the game for action cinema when it hit theaters in 1999. Drawing heavily from anime and wuxia martial arts movies, Lana and Lily Wachowski reinvented the language of western action with wire work, bullet time, and the soft bondage aesthetic that would all become the trademark of imitators for years to come. There's no shortage of iconic action beats in The Matrix, but the lobby shootout has proved the film's most enduring firefight, even without bullet time. Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) strut in to save their mentor Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), strapped up with guns and ammo and ready to take down an army. It's easy to take for granted now, but the gravity-defying wire work and gymnastic approach to gun fighting was unique and breathtaking at the time; a kinetic display of superhuman feats in the midst of gunfire so heavy the walls crumble around them in the action. Nearly 20 years later, The Matrix stands as a gorgeously shot, revelatory reinvention of on-screen action. -- Haleigh Foutch

No Country for Old Men (2007)

The Coen Brothers stage many fantastic shootouts in No Country for Old Men that run opposite of what we expect from a shootout scene. Frequently, it’s Josh Brolin getting shot at when he’s not expecting it but the scenarios generally don’t allow him to return fire; for instance when he’s floating down the river while bullets and dogs chase him and needs to just get down shore or the street shootout where he needs to get enough distance from the bullets and shattered glass to even grab his weapon and formulate a plan. His escape from his hotel room to a small town Texas street is one of the sweatiest moments of modern cinema. When Brolin narrowly escapes and gets into a man’s truck that receives a hail of gunfire from behind, we don’t ever see Javier Bardem fire. It’s a stylistic choice that makes Anton Chigurh out to be the Terminator but it also adds immensely to the tension as Brolin drives from the passenger seat while his windshield gets shot out, trying to get into a position where he can exit the vehicle and return fire. Each man follows a trail of blood to a place with no dead body.

I’m a constant defender of the Coens’ showing the aftermath of what would’ve been the classic shootout at a different hotel pool later down the road of this tale. In the river scene and the hotel to the street free fire, they’re making their audience grip the seats in tension but also salivate that eventually this will lead to the shootout to end all shootouts (for Chigurh has already been established as perhaps the most lethal man to ever exist in a non-action film). Instead of seeing that shootout we see the aftermath that Tommy Lee Jones’ detective discovers as a crime scene. The Coens wet our perverse appetite with these smaller shootouts but withhold the big one to set the stage for what No Country is really about, those who are disillusioned by how much violence escalates for a bag of money and what that says about the fabric of our society.

This selected scene is great shootout foreplay. The Coens are sorry not sorry that they withheld that showdown and you should rethink the shootout blue balls they left you with, because it sets the stage for bigger ideas than mere carnage. — Brian Formo

John Wick (2014)

The club scene in John Wick is the kind of set-piece that turns a film into an instant action classic. Directed by industry stunt veterans David Leitch and Chad Stahelski, the film gave Keanu Reeves yet another chance to prove himself as an action icon. Something he did handily as the titular retired assassin who has become a myth and legend in the criminal underground for his remarkable skill at killing a whole lot of people. Wick is pulled back into the life when a mobster's son kills his dog and steals his car, and though his power is clear from the way people treat him, we don't see Wick fully unleashed until the technicolor-tinged scene that pits him against a steady tide of mob henchmen in the midst of a crowded nightclub. Leitch and Stahelski know when to keep the camera clean and steady (which is most of the time) and when to cut for impact, and Reeves seals the deal with consummate commitment to stunt work that convinces us he's the ultimate mercenary who never missteps, never misses a shot, and always shoots to kill. -- Haleigh Foutch

Taxi Driver (1976)

Completely in line with Travis Bickle’s (Robert De Niro) comments about New York City being a cesspool of ugliness, Taxi Driver’s shootout scene is one of the filthiest looking shootouts ever put on film. Bickle views his deed of going to a brothel and killing everyone in order to save the teen prostitute (Jodie Foster) inside is a perverse twist on the knight-in-shining-armor story that’s usually reserved for strapping gentlemen. Bickle isn’t exactly a gentleman (he does take a date to a porno theater because those are the only movies he goes to see, after all) but he has our sympathy for most of the runtime because he’s really just a lonely person trying to make a connection with someone and he’s unable to connect. And that distance from people spirals into this horrific display that has shades of nobility despite the overall ickiness.

Martin Scorsese shoots the shootout at a strange, nightmarish pace, where speed creeps for blown apart fingers and bullets to a cheek (from Bickle’s sliding hideaway gun). There are grunts and wails in the hallway, a buzzing ring for a loss of hearing, and the girl’s scream at the top of the stairs (where a maiden is frequently kept against her will in Grimm fairytales). Scorsese then uses a freeze-frame shot from above when the police arrive, like God’s POV, and leaves us to judge whether the blood that’s been spilt can be washed clean. Make no mistake, when Bickle checks for more ammo and then puts a bloody finger to his head in the shape of a gun, he wants to die in a moment he perceives as glory. — Brian Formo

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

Compared to the chaotic shootout in The Wild Bunch, the final shootout in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a slow, almost melancholy burn as the titular outlaws are slowly surrounded, their luck finally running out.  The gunshots at Butch at Sundance eventually build into an oppressive, inescapable beat, a constant reminder that they had chance after chance to escape their lives of violence, but they never broke free, so now they’re pinned down, out of options, and facing imminent death.  And yet director George Roy Hill still gives them an “out” of sorts, rather than showing them gunned down in a hail of gunfire, the film stops on an image of Butch and Cassidy going out, guns blazing, alive and defiant to the end. – Matt Goldberg

Hard Boiled (1992)

John Woo is such a proven master of the cinematic shootout, he played a pivotal role in writing the playbook of modern action, so selecting one of his sequences for this kind of list is like fishing with dynamite. Hard Boiled itself has about three classic shootouts, and when you add in The Killer and A Better Tomorrow, forget about it. But the climactic gun battle in Hard Boiled is so iconic, intricate, and technically impressive, it's impossible to ignore. Set in a hospital, the scene is a roaming, rapidly paced succession of free fire as two detectives make their way through a maternity ward packed with mobster henchmen. Depending on who you ask, the scene is best known for the staggering, near three-minute single take of uninterrupted action insanity or for the unforgettable image of Chow Yun-Fat blasting bad guys away with a gun in one hand and a baby in the other. But no matter who you ask, it's one of the most influential and viscerally intense shootout scenes of all time. -- Haleigh Foutch