Reservoir Dogs is a crime drama and the first movie from Quentin Tarantino, starring Tarantino, Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi, Eddie Bunker, Lawrence Tierney, Kirk Baltz, and Randy Brooks.
A group of criminals, all dressed identically and given color-coded nicknames, rob a diamond warehouse (off screen) and make an absolute goat-fuck of it. The story picks up with career criminal Mr. White (Keitel) driving new thief Mr. Orange (Roth) to their rendezvous point - but Orange has been shot in the stomach and is bleeding to death. From there, everything continually unravels and we learn more of what happened at the heist - an alarm went off, Mr. Blonde (Madsen) started randomly shooting people, cops arrived, everyone ran.
We learn in flashbacks that Mr. Blonde isn't normally in on jobs like this; he just got out of prison after doing four years because he wouldn't rat out Joe Cabot (Tierney), the mob boss putting this whole thing together. Cabot's son Nice Guy Eddy (Penn) puts him on this job because they're friends, so that didn't work out so great. But of course the truth is that the only fucking professional Mr. Pink (Buscemi) was right - it was a setup, there is a rat in the house (it's Mr. Orange, and he telegraphs it in the very first scene), and this was all doomed from the word go.
This movie is not for everyone, but that's mostly because it's a heist movie where you don't see the heist. Really it reminds me more of a Mamet play than anything else, except of course for the usual Tarantino violence. Mr. Blonde takes a cop (Baltz, who I don't think gets enough credit for this role) hostage and then tortures him and cuts off his ear, and the scene was disturbing enough that Wes Craven walked out of a screening. Graphic violence in movies doesn't usually bother me (when it does, it's usually more about the context than the violence itself), so setting that aside, the performances are what make this movie.
Keitel, Roth, and Buscemi to me are the biggest standouts, but Madsen, Penn, and Baltz do amazing jobs, too. The situation is high-tension start to finish, to the point that the flashbacks do a nice job of letting off a little pressure. The last flashback we see is Mr. Orange, with him training as an undercover officer with his mentor Holdaway (Brooks), and by the time we flip back to the warehouse, now just covered in blood, there's a breath of, if not relief, then finality - it feels like it's all coming to an end.
If I have a complaint, it's that we never learn anything about Mr. Pink, who seems like an interesting character. Likewise, Mr. Brown (Tarantino) is just there so that Quentin has his monologue about dicks, and Mr. Blue (Bunker) has about 4 lines and then dies offscreen, so I don't really see the point in including him. But this is pretty minor, all told.
My Grade: A-
Rewatch Value: Medium
Next up: Resident Evil
No comments:
Post a Comment