Movie #64 – Reservoir Dogs (1992) - 99 min, cert 18.
Six criminals have been recruited for a diamond heist by a crime boss and his son. They don’t know each other, and to prevent them being able to identify each other they have all been assigned colour aliases – White, Blue, Pink, Orange, Brown & Blonde. The heist has just happened but has gone terribly wrong. Those gang members who have managed to get away rendezvous at an abandoned warehouse and try to work out what went wrong. What actually went wrong was that one of them, Mr Orange (Tim Roth), is an undercover cop. He was shot in the stomach trying to get away, has been brought back by Mr White (Harvey Keitel) and now lies in a pool of blood in the corner, waiting for the boss to arrive so the police can come in and arrest them all.
This was Quentin Tarantino’s first feature either as a writer or a director, and as debut’s go, it’s pretty extraordinary. The set up is unusual. It’s about a jewel heist, only it isn’t about the heist itself. It’s about the aftermath, when they’re all pointing fingers at each other looking for someone to blame for the fiasco that has just taken place. The cast is quite impressive for a debut movie as well – Tim Roth, Harvey Keitel, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi & Lawrence Tierney. Apparently it was Keitel’s involvement as producer that helped bring the big names in.
It is everything you would expect of a Tarantino film – a soundtrack full of obscure seventies pop, fast-paced, expletive-heavy dialogue, a blasé attitude to extreme violence. If you like Pulp Fiction, you’ll probably like this, but perhaps not quite a much.
Score – 8/10. I like Tarantino’s style, and this is typical of it.
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