Sheer brilliance...prepare to watch it over and over again

Rating: 10/10 (14 December 2009)

After Soderburgh's "sex, lies, and videotape" announced the arrival of independent cinema with a polite cough, it's younger brother "Reservoir Dogs" stumbled in the banquet hall and puked on the floor. But oh, what a glorious heave.
There are two things right off that make RD so astounding. The first is that it both honored the genre of the crime drama and simultaneously took every one of its time-honored conventions and gleefully ripped them to pieces. The second is that this multi-faceted character-driven action picture, which is so tight and so seamless (while still managing to be jaw-droppingly original in its execution) could be the work of a (for all intents and purposes) a debut director.
People accuse Tarantino of writing scripts full of sensationalized dialog ("it sounds cool but people would never really talk that way"). I don't agree. I think what primarily gives his films their appeal and power is that his characters talk PRECISELY about the things we would talk about...the insane minutiae that would normally bore the average person silly, but in a cool way. It's a lot like a Seinfeld crossed with a film-noir.
And this easily relatable language allows us to care about and becomes involved with a variety of characters, not the least of which are a gang of hardened criminals running for cover after a botched jewelry heist.
What's even more astounding about the film is that the plot is really just a sidebar to the character dissection at the film's center. We want to know what drives these guys, and after seeing the movie, we do. We may not like what we see, but we never look away whether in boredom or disbelief. These are not cardboard action figures.
How Tarantino plays this rich cast of rogues against each other and the constant switches in narrative time-line is strategic and fascinating. Yes, it's been done before, in other films, but rarely to this great of effect.
And that may be the most impressive thing about this movie: it does what all truly great indies do best...they economize toward the betterment of the picture. Every frame here adds something...even the blank frames where all you hear is Steven Wright's wonderfully adenoidal mumble as he exhorts you to attend the next Monster Truck Extravaganza. That undoubtedly lowbrow event fits the seamy world the picture revolves in perfectly.
This film is just as unmissable, and once you see it, assure yourself it will be only for the first time.