Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Reservoir Dogs covers, in Tarantino’s favoured non-linear fashion, the planning and disastrous results of a diamond heist after which it becomes apparent there’s a rat in the house. Said rat is Tim Roth’s Mr. Orange, an undercover cop who wormed his way into the good graces of the criminal organisation of Lawrence Tierney’s Joe Cabot and his son, Chris Penn’s Nice Guy Eddie, and is now bleeding out on the floor of a dingy warehouse while Harvey Keitel’s Mr. White, Steve Buscemi’s Mr. Pink, and Michael Madsen’s psychotic Mr. Blonde all point fingers, and guns at each other. Oh, and don’t worry about that cop sitting over in the corner, he won’t be hearing anything.
Tarantino’s first film pretty much started as he meant to go on, jumping around in time and combining relatively obscure music choices with discordant actions, in this instance giving a generation an entirely new perspective on Stealers Wheel. That ear-cutting scene in particular lead to criticisms of Tarantino’s work as being violent, gratuitously even, and perhaps in his later work that might even be fair to say, but I’ve always found Reservoir Dogs tame by the standards of any post-Code time.
Like most of his films, Reservoir Dogs is less about the narrative, hence my rather brief summation, but more about hanging out with the characters, and of course, the main Tarantino hallmark of the period, the dialogue, which like Kevin Smith’s contemporaneous work, is not particularly realistic, but is, undeniably cool and fun.
And, at a risk of spoiling my meta criticism of every Tarantino film, I rather get the impression that if you were to ask Tarantino why he wrote, shot, directed, etc, any part of any film he’s made, the answer would be “because I thought it would be cool and/or funny”. As more often than not I’m on his wavelength, that means there’s a good number of films on here that I found cool and/or funny, Reservoir Dogs most certainly amongst them, but I’m not sure I’ve got a great deal more to say about them.
All surface and no feeling, maybe, but with a surface this polished, with this many great turns, and this much entertainment, it’s hard to be hard on it.