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Reservoir Dogs
Quentin Tarantino
USA, 1992, 100 minutes
Review by Gerald Houghton (1993)

Before the titles even run a camera has encircled a discussion about the hidden agenda of Madonna’s ‛Like A Virgin’ and the etiquette of tipping, by a gang assembled under colourful aliases to pull off a daylight diamond heist. Immediately post credits Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) lies screaming to be taken to a hospital in the blood-soaked rear of a car driven by Mr. White (Harvey Keitel). But White insists they keep their prearranged rendezvous in an old warehouse.

It’s clear that something has gone badly wrong because, announces Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi), there’s an informer in their ranks. Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen), having slaughtered a few hostages in his own escape, arrives with a trussed up cop in the trunk of his car. Brown (Tarantino himself) and Blue (real ex-bank robber Eddie Bunker) are dead. While Pink and White recover their stashed haul and the semi-conscious Orange bleeds to death in the corner, Blonde proceeds to torture his captive just for the sheer hell of it.

From the beginning, Reservoir Dogs is no normal thriller. It assembles the kind of top grade ensemble cast that other, bigger film-makers simply dream about, with Keitel enthused to the extent of signing on as a producer and immediately elevating former video store assistant Quentin Tarantino’s debut feature from its poverty row beginnings to a more impressive if still relatively cheap $1.5 million. Keitel seizes the role of consummate professional criminal with barely-disguised glee and shows why he’s rightly lauded as one of the finest actors of his generation. 

This is an actors film. Frenzied Briton Roth discovers a highly convincing US accent and reserves of pain and despair that are genuinely wrenching, and with the gang assembled under the stately menace of screen veteran Lawrence Tierney and his arrogant, bloated son Chris Penn, with the nervous hysteria of Coen Brothers regular Buscemi. And Madsen (so good in Thelma & Louise) is the quietly smiling psychopath you like until he produces a straight razor from his boot.

Reservoir Dogs, though, is unquestionably Tarantino’s triumph. The writer-director takes his self-penned, coruscating and frequently hysterical dialogue by the horns and stampedes it through the film with an unerring sense of direction. It’s not just for the use of Keitel in a key role that he’s been called the new Scorsese, picking up on a sense of rhythm and strategic cutting (check that extended opening discussion and brilliant slo-mo credit sequence), and juxtaposing found music much as Scorsese did in Mean Streets and the more recent Goodfellas; once Mr. Blonde is finished with it, the innocuous, Dylanesque ‛Stuck In the Middle With You’ will never seem quite the same again.

Structurally Reservoir Dogs borrows as much from the young Stanley Kubrick as Scorsese, using the complex flashback techniques of 1956’s The Killing to fashion a sense of synchronous events unfolding and the back stories of the main protagonists, all slotting into what, in essence, is an hour of post-heist real time – the hour it takes Mr. Orange to bleed to death. 

This is not to imply – as many have – that Reservoir Dogs is an excessively violent picture. Like Goodfellas, it builds on the occasional explicit moment with the violence of speech and exaggerated male bonding, assuming an air of brutality without recourse to the gratuitous. Taken shot by shot, audiences probably see a lot more than is actually on screen. 

On top of all that, Tarantino’s unmasking of the betrayer shocks as much in its method as its revelation, and he neatly wraps the whole in a climax as magnificent as it is ridiculous, still finding space for a note of ambiguity in the fade out.

This is hi-octane, fuel-injected movie making at its best, roaring across the screen with both barrels blazing, but managing amid all the flash and crash to achieve the delicate balance between style and substance, brains and brawn. Where it takes him remains to be seen, but that Tarantino has talent in spades is beyond debate, as is Reservoir Dogs’ status as a contemporary classic. Let’s go to work.