Doctor, ain't there nothing' I can take?

Rating: Null/10 (14 April 2011)

"Reservoir Dogs" ends with Harry Nilsson's "Coconut" playing over the credits, a quirky song in which a woman "puts the lime in the coconut and drinks 'em both up" before getting a bellyache and calling a doctor who tells her to "put the lime in the coconut and drink 'em both up" which causes her to get a bellyache and call a doctor who tells her to "put the lime in the coconut and drink 'em both up".
In other words, the "cause" is the "cure" is the "cause" is the "cure" is the "cause". But is the woman stupid for listening to the doctor or is the doctor wise in accelerating the problem until her sickness goes away (possibly because the idiot's bellyache eventually leads to death?).
Regardless, Quinten Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" finds a gang of foul mouthed low-lives trapped in a similar, inane loop. After a botched jewelry heist, a group of criminals gather in an abandoned warehouse where they try to ascertain who amongst them is an undercover cop. In other words, there's a poisonous lime in a group of coconut nut cases, and they're all busy trying to smoke him out.
As arguments ensue, one of the gang members, whilst waiting on a doctor, begins to die slowly due to a bullet (ie belly ache) in the gut. Meanwhile, tensions escalate to such an extent that the men shoot one another to death. The wounded man with the bullet hole belly ache is then revealed to be the poisonous rat. Had the others let him die, they'd have been fine.
So it's the "lime in the coconut" scenario; uncovering the cause of the stomach ache equals finding the rat, finding the rat leads to stomach aches, stomach aches are cured by finding the rat, finding the rat leads to stomach aches...etc etc, until the patients all die. Cue the coconut song.
Tarantino typically makes modern versions of 1970s exploitation films. But while "Reservoir Dogs" has the seediness, cool posing, macho vulgarity and blood quota of 1970s exploitation cinema, its actual framework owes more to 1950s noir. In this regard it unfolds like a stage-play, is dialogue driven, possesses a bare aesthetic, sparse, stripped down sets, and ends with a fatalistic noir climax in which everyone dies.
And while the film pulls from 70s blaxploitation, Hong Kong cool, Lam's "City on Fire", Kubrick's "The Killing", the original "Oceans 11" (all those slow motion men in suit shots), and Peckinpah's blood operas, Tarantino's overall tone is much more playful. He's more akin to David Mamet, using freestyle dialogue to toy with conventions. What matters is not the content of the film, or even the characters, but the farcical playfulness of it all; the way it moves, skirts around expectations and then joyously self destructs. Today, with most artists now with an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema, such that they can, like Tarantino, spin entire tales out of bits and pieces in a matter of days, the challenge is to slow down and let go of the mix-tape. This kind of "I can do this, but should I?" questioning is itself the core dilemma of Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds".
"Reservoir Dog's" bloodiness was deemed sensational back in the 90s, but that's largely because Hollywood's previous 15 years were dominated by a kind of sanitized, blockbuster violence ("Indiana Jones", "Star Wars" etc). Many complain that the film relies too heavily on designer brutality, cool, gratuitous violence, and that its characters are simply pop culture chewing posers, but while that is true, the film is also unique in Tarantino's filmography ("Basterds" excluded) in that it actually plays like a warped morality tale. Shakespeare with guns, the film rejects any sanctimonious message, "crime doesn't pay" or otherwise, and instead lets us eavesdrop on a bunch of psychopaths who, quite hypocritically, view themselves as professionals with ordinary jobs. Throughout the film our criminals thus view with scorn a psycho played by Michael Madsen. They're not like him, you see. They have ethics, codes, rules and professional courtesy. But when push comes to shove they nevertheless all degenerate into reservoir dogs, cruel, psychopathic and little more than petty hoodlums.
Like most of Tarantino's films, "Reservoir Dogs" is a film about film. Here the characters are all artifacts chewing on pop culture artifacts, except Tim Roth, who plays an undercover cop. While Keitel does a phony tough guy routine and Michael Madesen does a cheap Clint Eastwood, Tim Roth's the chameleon actor who infiltrates their school play and brings their curtain down. He even starts by killing their director.
7.9/10 – Worth two viewings. See Mamet's films, some of which do this stuff better.