Fenzel, Willow
The midget is NOT the baby's daddy
The best gunfight holding a baby has gotta be the final battle in Willow. You’ve got evil queen Bavmorda against Willow Upgood, who until this point in the story has been thoroughly overshadowed by his taller, more powerful friends. Willow, clutching the destined infant Elora Danan, does battle with the wicked queen and brings peace to — whatever bizarre world Willow takes place in.
What, you say the battle in Willow isn’t a gunfight? Well, HA! I’m not holding a baby! It’s just a bunch of rocks! Now, evaporate yourself with lightning! The old disappearing pig trick — works every time.
Stokes, Hard Boiled
The best gunfight while holding a baby comes from John Woo’s Hard Boiled. Of course, it helps that Hard Boiled isn’t just some middling action movie that they tarted up by throwing in a shootout with a baby: it was already the greatest action movie of all time before they tarted it up by throwing in a shootout with a baby. In the 90 second clip below, John Woo offers a master class in the cinema of badass:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ytAQ2MzQ9U
The lessons I draw from this are three:
- Set your movie in a hospital. While Eisenstein (that hack) forces his audience to accept that a baby carriage just happens
to be perched at the top of that particular staircase, the presence of the baby in Hard Boiled is completely justified. And hospitals have more to offer a budding auteur than just babies alone! Perhaps your climactic fight scene will require a defibrillator, or a cylinder of oxygen, or a stack of year-old magazines. Perhaps it will even require a baby to climb around on any one of these three objects! Either way, the hospital has you covered. - Don’t underestimate the importance of proper ear protection. Before Inspector “Tequila” Yuen commences to blasting fools, he carefully packs the baby’s ears with gauze. As a result, the child’s delicate inner ear is protected from irreversible hearing damage. It’s this attention to detail that sets John Woo apart from other filmmakers. (Attention to detail… and hospitals. Because where did he get the gauze? That’s right.) Now compare that to the other movies on this list: The baby in Potemkin totally dies, and with her surrogate father treating her like a pig, Elora Danan is going to grow up with an eating disorder.
- Always link to the German language version of the youtube video. German makes everything more badass.
Willow is just….inspired! If only fenzel could have shoehorned Madmartigan, the single greatest swordsman ever, into his post…
German Hard Boiled, that’s got to be best breakfast ever!
I went with Children of Men. It’s got tank shells going through walls with a baby involved. Tank shells beat deconstructionist faux reality TV shows by about 146mm (155mm tank minus the 9mm Beretta she’s using).
It’s a little ridiculous how few of these gunfights actually involve shooters holding babies.
Children of Men. Because A) the baby is relevant to the story, B) the battle is one of the most intense I’ve ever seen in cinema, and C) long-takes are uber-cool.
Wow, I’ve seen _The Contenders_! Years ago, late at night on HBO.
That is one low-budget movie with some low rent production values, but you can tell it was a labor of love.
And sorry Jonathan, while I was typing my post Madmartigan was busy outside fighting the giant troll/dragon monster.
Hardboiled ahs a pretty intense gunfight while holding a baby, and it takes place inside of a hospital.
If only there had been a baby involved in _Unforgiven_, since that is, indeed, my favorite western.
Alack, alas, ’tis not the case. I went with _Children of Men_, too.
Immediately thought of Lek (Leak) a Dutch crime movie from 2000. Devoted father and drug dealer Jack shoots his way out of an ambush strapped with his 8-month old kid in a frontal carrier bag.
Actor got the highest Dutch acting performance award for the role.