5. From Russia With Love
The original and gold standard for this sort of sequence, the climatic train compartment fight between Sean Connery's 007 and Robert Shaw's "Robert Shaw's Bond Villain" (he probably has a real name, but c'mon) is so good it's almost anticlimactic that the real end of With Love is just a massive boat chase with dozens of explosions. This one is all about the pay-off. From the opening moments of the film, Shaw's Red Grant is given only two real characteristics: 1) He's really good at killing people, and 2) He really really wants to kill James Bond. Bond, of course, is a Carcharodon-phile and seeks vengeance for all of the Great Whites that have died by Grant's hand (Note: aspects of this plot synopsis are somewhat less than accurate). So the two characters are on a collision course from the very opening frames of the film, creating a tension and expectation that director Terence Young must somehow meet lest the movie be written out entirely. The obvious solution would have been to stage a giant, apocalyptic blow out on top of some burning super-fortress, possibly with sharks and/or laser beams. Instead, Young went in the other direction to fantastic results. After a tense stand-off, Bond manages to disarm Shaw, followed by the lights getting shot out. The two proceed to level the compartment, each man throttling and being-throttled in turn. It's a perfect sequence because it encapsulates so much of why Connery's Bond is still such a gold standard over fifty years later. He's suave, yes, but there's a thuggish nature just beneath that surface that takes only the slightest prompting to emerge. He won't just strangle you, he'll also rob your corpse and spit out a pun afterwards.