Taratino's First Crime Thriller is Far-Out!!!

Rating: 10/10 (13 May 2010)

Writer & director Quentin Tarantino's freshman effort as a helmer concerns a ruthless criminal gang and a jewelry store robbery gone awry. Indeed, this is the movie that introduced audiences to Tarantino as a director. Ostensibly, without the participation of Harvey Keitel, this movie might never have attracted the critical and popular attention that it eventually garnered. Moreover, "Reservoir Dogs" would have qualified as little more than routine heist caper were it not for the distinctive Tarantino treatment. Compared with his later film "Pulp Fiction," which reinvented the crime thriller, "Reservoir Dogs" qualifies as a relatively modest effort. Basically, an undercover Los Angeles cop infiltrates a gang of professional thieves and discovers that getting shot in the stomach is all in a day's work. No, this is not the kind of movie that prompt anybody to resort to a life of crime because everybody here faces the consequences of their actions. Squeamish people who abhor the sight of blood and gore might find Tarantino's film highly objectionable. When individuals are shot, they bleed profusely. One character spends more than half of the movie wallowing in a pool of his own blood. The most notorious scene involves a psychopath who tortures a tied-up Los Angeles policeman for information. During the interrogation, the hood carves off the cop's ear without a qualm. Those who prefer happy endings should definitely avoid this tragic thriller.
Violent, profane, ribald, ironic and sometimes sickeningly sadistic, "Reservoir Dogs" consists largely of provocative conversations with an occasional bloodbath of a shoot-out thrown in to punctuate all this loquacity. Tarantino thumbs his nose at conventional storytelling methods and orchestrates the gritty events in this laconic 99-minute melodrama so that they occur out of chronological order. Indeed, Tarantino's decision to tell his story with no apparent order with regard to the progression of events enhances "Reservoir Dogs" and adds to its substance. Mind you, in some instances, juggling the chronology of a story may impair suspense, but that doesn't happen here. Furthermore, Tarantino delivers his brand of flavorful dialogue with some 272 uses of the F-word, and the stories that the thugs swap foreshadow the kinds of narratives that "Pulp Fiction" would contain. No Tarantino movie would be complete without numerous references to older movies and one conversation compares a character to the short-lived African-American television series "Get Christy Love." Despite its micro-budget, this 1992 crime drama boasts a fabulous cast, including Harvey Keitel, Christopher Penn, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Steve Buscemi, and legendary screen veteran Lawrence Tierney. Comedian Steven Wright contributes a deadpan but soulful voice-over performance as a radio disc jockey, and musical supervisors Kathy Nelson and Karyn Rachtman provide several golden oldies from the 1970s that haven't been run into the ground in previous films. Harvey Keitel and the entire cast are nothing short of superb.