#MOVIE WHERE THE WIZARD SHOOTS THE DEVIL WITH A GUN MOVIE#
#MOVIE WHERE THE WIZARD SHOOTS THE DEVIL WITH A GUN FREE#

#MOVIE WHERE THE WIZARD SHOOTS THE DEVIL WITH A GUN MOVIE#

If you're going to have a movie about a pair of dueling assassins, you'd better have some epic shootout scenes. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. It's visceral action, cleanly shot with a steady hand. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. It also enhances the early gem of a shootout where brothers are watching actual brothers explode with blood. 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. 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. 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). Walter Hill has famously said that every film of his is a Western. Without further ado, check out our picks for the best movie shootouts below and sound off in the comments with your favorites.

Though those motifs pop up, these selections are based on the thrill of action rather than the tension of inaction. Another important note is that this is a list of shootouts, not duels or Mexican standoffs. We love and admire their repeated excellence, but we also wanted to cast a wider net and highlight more films. 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 kept our selection to one per director. A couple house cleaning notes of interest.

#MOVIE WHERE THE WIZARD SHOOTS THE DEVIL WITH A GUN FREE#

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.

Movie where the wizard shoots the devil with a gun