My latest Sympatico/MSN movie column is going to start arguments. It’s a rundown of eight great movie gunfights, starting with “The Terminator” in 1984.
Obviously, I’m not trying to list the greatest gunfights ever — I mean, that would require a much longer list, and a specific definition of what constitutes a gunfight. Is the showdown of “High Noon” a gunfight? Is the laserrific climax of “Mooonraker” a gunfight? (For the record, that’s yes on one and no on two.)
So instead of another exhaustive list of fifteen or twenty or even thirty movies, I went with eight distinctive action sequences that could not be confused for anything other than gunfights. Because they’re full of guns.
Enjoy!
I know you said it wasn’t an exhaustive list, but where’s Shootout? After Clive Owen gets reluctantly drawn into someone else’s problem…normally I hate birth being trivialized in a movie scene, but I loved the umbilical cord being cut mid-shootout by gunfire. Please say this was number 9 or 10 on your list.
You know, I did think about “Shoot ‘Em Up”, but in the end I had to leave it out because there wasn’t a single sequence I could point to — the whole movie is the gunfight, which places that film on a level all its own. But yeah, I probably could have mentioned that.
True, true, it was pretty much continuous…and how to work in the carrots? And oops…I got the title wrong. I thought later in the evening that I had, but didn’t want to be obsessive enough to go back and check.