Movie Shoot-outs. A Primer

The two most common things people in movies do to each other is kiss and kill. When they kill, they tend to use guns, that most charismatic of murder weapons, and nothing is more charismatic on film than a bunch of people with guns trying to kill one another at the same time. So, if you want to make sure people watch your movie, you could do worse than throw in a few shoot-outs. This raises the question: how do you film your shoot-out? Filmmakers have offered several models to choose from.



Hyper-realism


Michael Mann's Heat is usually cited as the apotheosis of realistic film shoot-outs, and there's a reason for that. The throw-down between Robert De Niro's bank robbers and Al Pacino's LAPD in downtown L.A. is striking in its comittment to a flat, unaffected sound design and crisp editing. It doesn't hurt that a few years after Heat came out, a couple of bank robbers lit up an LA neighborhood and the news footage was almost indistinguishable from the movie. Still, Heat does not, in fact, feature the apotheosis of the hyper-realistic shootouts. Towards the end of the scene, there's a some close-ups of Pacino that make audience identification a bit too intense to qualifiy as hyper-realism. That honor goes to the climax of Christopher McQuarrie's Way of the Gun, a mind-bendingly pretensious bit of late-90s Tarantino thievery starring Ryan Philippe at his most un-interesting. The only thing to recommend it is that final shoot-out, which is notable for its studied distance and super methodical blocking; the bad guys even use the Weaver stance, for god's sake.


"Ballet of Bullets"

Nowadays, shootouts that feature gushing blood spurts and bodies flying through the air in super slow motion are synonymous with John Woo and his goddamn doves. The style was pioneered by cowboy philosopher Sam Peckinpah, specifically his masterpiece, The Wild Bunch. That was a revolutionary film; the apocalyptic final shoot-out between William Holden's gang and pretty much the entire Mexican army was a sharp break with the strong tradition of bloodless gunplay in Hollywood horse operas. The style has been so overused by now, particularly by motherfuckers from Hong Kong, that the returns have diminished drastically. At this point, the only way to make it interesting is to ratchet up the ultraviolence to stratospheric heights. And yet, it's been over a decade since Chow Yun Fat shot up a hospital full of pregnant women and old folks in Hard Boiled, and nobody has come close.


Rapidly Edited, Music-Saturated Suckfest

If you've seen the ungoldy bad shootout at the end of Enemy of the State, then you've seen the absolute worst this style of shootout direction has to offer. The Scott brothers, Tony and Ridley, are the supreme acolytles of this awful, obvious and migraine-inducing way of doing business. As in most cinematic matters, Ridley is slightly more compotent than his special needs bro. It's also the default style of pretty much every mediocre to bad former commerical director who makes action films, from the braindead likes of 3000 Miles to Graceland to the equally braindead but guility pleasureable Smokin' Aces.