A fierce crime thriller

Rating: 9/10 (26 October 2005)

A group of crooks are assembled to pull of a jewelry heist and the stick-up quickly turns to a shootout and the seemingly perfect crime goes perfectly wrong. The alarm goes off, the police show up, innocents get shot, and the crooks split and barely make it out alive. Were they set up? Bad luck? Or what? What "follows" is the aftermath of it all as they reflect how they got there and what they are going to do now. I put the "follows" in quotes, because the robbery is the inciting incident to the main story, but interestingly this film has plenty of back story that develops as we see how each of the robbers wound up pulling the job and the whole film is very broken up chronologically. Interestingly Tarantino makes it work and each back-story or reflection is clever and the whole mass of all the flashbacks, some pertaining directly to the robbery some not, make for a big picture showing who these lowlifes really are.
Now that's another thing: lowlifes. The protagonists are essentially that. Uneducated, career crooks, that can't hold a regular job or go straight. Basically people that no one is too interested in, but Tarantino treats them like fair human beings and it is admittedly strange to see people like this with a human or humorous side and to see how they justify to themselves what they do for a living. I have heard this film bashed (along with Pulp Fiction) for the pointlessness of its conversations, but if you think about it, life is full of conversations that you forget the next day. And what do you expect gun totting crooks to discuss? Something that a regular person would consider meaningful to their life? While I do agree many of the dialogs are tedious and don't really relate to my life or anyone else that I know, they paint a believable human image of people we'd like to do away with.
This film is based on Ringo Lam's "City on Fire," starring Chow Yun-Fat, but out of the two "Reservoir Dogs" is definitely better. It is much more focused on its characters and on the film's main situation, the robbery. Lam's film wandered too much, but it is also a recommended viewing as it inspired one of film-making fiercest debuts. 9/10
Rated R: graphic violence, brutality, and strong profanity