Most Epic Sniper Movie Scenes Ever Filmed

Who doesn't love movie snipers? They're the zen ninjas of the action roster, deadly from a distance and always cool amid the chaos. Even when madness is raining down over their heads, when all seems lost — our hearts stop at that deep breath, that slow finger light on the trigger, waiting for the perfect shot. A solid sniper scene can turn a run-of-the-mill action flick into an edge-of-your-seat suspense ride. It can make a great movie even better. And sometimes, it can bring the action to a head all on its own. Let's look at some of the greatest sniper scenes ever filmed.

How cool are Barry Pepper's characters? We're talking Matty Demaret in "Knockaround Guys," Joe Galloway in "We Were Soldiers," and, most famously, Private Daniel Jackson, the Bible-quoting sharpshooter in "Saving Private Ryan." Even in a movie filled with A-list actors and incredible visuals, Pepper never fades into the background.

What's the best example of his awesomeness in this classic World War II flick? When Adrian Caparzo (Vin Diesel) gets hit by a sniper and everybody's diving for cover, Pepper's Jackson is already doing the numbers, loading his gun, and pinpointing the enemy sniper's position. When the moment comes for his skills to come into play, he takes charge of the situation with ease, taking down the other sniper in the most hardcore way possible during one of the most iconic scenes in the entire movie.

In the books by Lee Child, Jack Reacher is 6 feet and 5 inches tall, with fists the size of ham hocks. Tom Cruise is a little closer to 5 feet 6 inches, with fists best described as sensuous wiffle balls. But despite the outcry over the size discrepancy and the fact that it bombed with critics, 2012's "Jack Reacher" is still a pretty darn good movie, and Cruise can still glare with the best of them.

The movie opens with a sniper set up inside a raised parking garage, scanning over seemingly random people at a public park across the way. It's a brutal, intense scene, built on the pregnant silence as the scope jumps from person to person. There's no music, just the slow, rhythmic breathing of the man behind the scope, and you know something bad is going to happen, even before the bullets start flying. Sure, it doesn't have as much action as the shoot-out at the end of the movie, but the way this scene kicks off the events of the film makes it one of the most important parts of the entire thing.

The story of real-life Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, "American Sniper" offers a hard-hitting look at the brutality of war in the Middle East and the effect it has on those who serve in the armed forces. Directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Bradley Cooper as Kyle, the movie plays out more like a Western than an in-the-trenches war movie, focusing on the actions and emotions of one man in the midst of a war-torn land.

In the movie, Kyle rarely takes his eye off the scope, even when he's back home and far from the battlefield. Yet even with the many sniper scenes, one stands out: the 2,100-yard shot over the rooftops of Fallujah that cemented the real-life Chris Kyle's status as a legend among his fellow troops. In real life, the shot didn't happen quite the same way — but honestly, after the baby scene that fans couldn't get over, it's a safe bet that nobody really minded.

"Shooter" is a fast-paced, bullet-driven thrill ride caught somewhere between a war movie and a Sylvester Stallone-esque action romp. In other words, we like it.

Helmed by stylish action director Antoine Fuqua, "Shooter" stars Mark Wahlberg as an ex-Marine sniper named Bob Lee Swagger who's framed for killing the president. So what does he do? He goes on a rampage to find the real killer and clear his name, of course! Cue guns, guts, and glory, as Swagger reluctantly takes up his old skills to bring the bad guys to justice.

But Swagger isn't content to kill people the old-fashioned way. No, that would take too many bullets. In arguably the most epic scene of the movie, Swagger decides to kill an entire helicopter full of bad guys with his sniper rifle by blowing up a gas tank below it, engulfing the chopper in the ensuing fireball. Deadpool would approve.

The Hollywood debut of Russian director Timur Bekmambetov, "Wanted" punched through our screens with more style and flair than RuPaul in a laser tank. It's so stylized and over the top that you didn't realize that it wasn't actually that good until the credits were rolling and you found yourself wiping away the drool, wondering what in the world you just watched. In the "Wanted" universe, people can flip cars over other cars perfectly every time. People can jump from skyscraper to skyscraper, hitting headshots with the ease that comes from being born in the middle of a base jump. And people can even curve their bullets just by concentrating real hard and flicking their wrists. The movie isn't good, but it's super fun.

And the hook that brought us all in was the opening scene, where we watch a guy get shot by a sniper from across the city. After the bullet breaks through his forehead, time slows and reverses, showing the bullet fly backwards across the city, through a train, to the sniper himself. Visually, the shot defined the movie: impossible, but oh-so-shiny. In fact, there may have only been one other scene quite so satisfying in "Wanted" – the ending sniper scene.

As far as Westerns go, "Quigley Down Under" ranks among the best, despite not technically being a Western. Starring Tom Selleck as Matthew Quigley and Alan Rickman as his nemesis, Elliott Marston, it's got all the gunslinging fun you'd expect from cowboys in Australia.

Who can forget the moment Quigley arrives at Marston's ranch and is asked to prove his worth as a sharpshooter? Marston sends off one of his ranch hands with a bucket, and everyone watches the guy disappear into the distance on horseback while Quigley coolly adjusts his rifle. Then, without looking up to see where the target is, he goes full-on Selleck, drawling out, "Abooout there'll do." The scene's got more guts and swagger than the entire population of Deadwood and more grit than the Sahara. Needless to say, Quigley got the job.

As a movie about snipers sniping snipers, you can expect a lot of cool shots when you watch "Enemy at the Gates." But although it's been criticized over the years for the fact that all the Russians are inexplicably British, it's still a taut war thriller with one of the most epic matchups in movie history: Jude Law vs. Ed Harris. The question is, how do you pick a single scene from "Enemy at the Gates" to highlight? It's a hard choice. You've got Vassili Zaitsev (Law) and Tania Chernova (Rachel Weisz) pinned down after walking into Commissar Danilov's (Harris) trap. You've got Danilov picking off Koulikov (Ron Perlman), that mountain of manliness, as he leaps over a bombed-out gap in a building. And you've got Zaitsev keeping Danilov in his crosshairs while the latter slowly starts to realize it's all over.

But the most epic? We're calling it: Law's Zaitsev taking out enemy officers one by one, each shot timed to a bomb blast so nobody hears the rifle report. It comes early in the movie, but it's so perfect. The dawning panic as each officer realizes that the guy standing next to him is already dead builds up the tension so smoothly that you're almost cheering when Zaitsev stands to take aim at the last man left.

"The Bourne Identity" is a grounded, gritty movie that landed in just the right climate as the world was finally tiring of the increasingly cartoonish antics of Pierce Brosnan's James Bond. Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) isn't an un-killable super-spy — he is just a confused guy who happens to be really, really good at killing. And at no point in the movie is that more apparent than the scene in which he outsmarts a sniper who comes to take him down.

It's just so perfectly Bourne, always a step ahead of his enemies even when they start out with the upper hand. With nothing but a shotgun and a quick, explosive diversion, Bourne works his way close enough to take back the advantage. If that had been James Bond, he probably would have ... blinded him with a laser watch, or some other awfully convenient gadget, before escaping in his invisible car.  

Zack Snyder's 2004 remake of "Dawn of the Dead" did a fantastic job at taking away the social commentary of the George A. Romero original and replacing it with fast zombies, stilted dialogue, and more blood than the first three movies in the franchise combined. Which isn't to say it's a bad movie; it's still pretty good in its own right, thanks in no small part to scenes like the one we're about to dive into. And okay, this scene isn't exactly "epic" in the sense that most of these are, but be honest — when has a moment like this ever happened in another movie? For originality points alone, this scene ranks up on top.

Here's the setup: Holed up in a shopping mall during the zombie apocalypse, the small group of survivors gets a little bored. Enlisting the help of the gun shop owner across the parking lot, they play a game of "shoot the celebrity" in the crowd of milling zombies below. It's a good spot of comedic relief to an otherwise intense movie, and even today it's worth a watch just to see "Modern Family" star Ty Burrell playing a complete jerk to everybody around him.

Starring Bruce Willis and featuring the kind of eight-paragraph plot summary made popular by Harrison Ford's Jack Ryan movies, "The Jackal" is that one super-convoluted political action thriller that we've all seen parts of on TNT at some point or another. Okay, it's not all that bad, but even at its release, most of "The Jackal's" fame stemmed from one particular scene. You know the one.

After mechanic Ian Lamont (Jack Black) builds a motorized base for a giant .50-caliber automatic sniper rifle, the Jackal decides to test it on him, just to make sure it works. Lamont runs a little ways out, holds out a pack of cigarettes at the Jackal's orders ... and BLAM! Suddenly, the mechanic has no arm. Man, it's brutal. The music is intense, not to mention Lamont's stumbling and falling, already knowing what's about to happen. We also know what's about to happen, but it's still a surprise when it finally does. As forgettable as the rest of the movie is, this scene has to rank on some kind of best-of list somewhere. Somewhere ...

Like "Wanted," 2006's "Smokin' Aces" is a violent, over-the-top experience that will never be called a classic, although you can bet it's sitting on a lot of DVD shelves right now, just waiting for a lazy weekend. The movie's about a gaggle of assassins trying to take out Buddy "Aces" Israel (Jeremy Piven) in his high-rise hotel suite, but that's not important.

The important part is when a bunch of those assassins converge on the hotel at the same time as Richard Messner (Ryan Reynolds) and Donald Carruthers' (Ray Liotta) FBI team. There's a brief elevator shootout, and it's crazy-cool, but it's just an appetizer for the mayhem that occurs when the elevator door opens and Sharice Watters (Taraji Henson) opens fire with a .50-caliber sniper rifle from across the hotel courtyard. Chaos erupts, bodies fly across the room, and Reynolds' Messner screams profanities almost nonstop. If that doesn't sound like fun, we don't know what is.