Westerns understand the power of a well-timed gunfight better than any other genre. After hours of simmering tensions in rugged landscapes, frontier towns, and saloons, a final exchange of gunfire can determine everything. Every Western fan knows the rules: the characters stand at the opposite end of the street to their enemy, walk slowly toward each other, and then draw their gun and shoot.

This has fallen out of fashion recently with the rise of the revisionist Western, where the movie's hero takes out more and more enemies, at the expense of the intensity of a one-on-one duel. Some classic Western showdowns, including from brilliant films like Unforgiven, True Grit, High Noon, and Rio Bravo, have epic gun battles, but it's not quite the same as an iconic showdown. Between desperate struggles for survival and long-awaited confrontations between sworn enemies, these are the best final gunfights in Westerns.

Between corrupt small-town sheriffs, hired guns, and bounty hunters, Western movies are full of great villains.

Tombstone hasn't aged particularly well; its dialogue can be cheesy, the performances occasionally veer into melodrama, and the story is sprawling and unfocused. What hasn't dated at all, however, is Val Kilmer's iconic performance as Doc Holliday . He effectively walks away with the film, with his heated rivalry with Johnny Ringo (Michael Biehn) proving much more compelling than Wyatt Earp's (Kurt Russell) crusade against the Cowboys.

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