Bloody crime drama

Rating: Null/10 (31 July 2011)

Reservoir Dogs is an action drama film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. It stars Harvey Keitel as Mr. White, Tim Roth as Mr. Orange, Michael Madsen as Mr. Blonde, Chris Penn as Nice Guy Eddie Cabot Steve Buscemi as Mr. Pink, Edward Bunker as Mr. Blue and Tarantino as Mr. Brown. It is a movie about a bank robbery gone wrong. Each of the robbers uses a color as an alias to hide their true identity from each other. The bank heist goes wrong and the police seem to be alerted to the attempt before hand. The second half of the movie revolves around the robbers trying to figure out who has betrayed them. In the end the robbers find out which one of them has betrayed the rest. Reservoir Dogs is the first of many stylized crime movies by Quentin Tarantino. While it is considered an action film most of the story is told through flashbacks and the actually gunfights and car chases are kept to a minimum. Tarantino allows the realistic interaction between the characters to become the action. From the very beginning of the movie, such as when all of the robbers are having a meal at a restaurant table, the conversations and interactions between them seem to be the focus of the movie. A lot of the conversations are trivial yet it adds realism to the film. As in real life not everything that is said is important and reservoir Dogs seems to embrace this fact with a lot of back and forth chatter. I found it surprising that after the first scene the main characters are never seen in the same room. One motif of the film is the subjective viewpoint used by Tarantino to put viewers directly into the conversations of the actors. Camera angles are used to give the effect of being a member of the crew and give a heightened sense of inclusiveness. Tarantino also uses extremely violent shots to convey the reality of the dark side of crime. Mr. Orange spends most of the movie curled up on the floor in a bloody mess and one very gory scene involving a police hostage forces viewers to think about the less glamorous and dangerous side of an attempted bank robbery that earlier movies try to hide. Tarantino continues these themes In Pulp Fiction as ultra violent scenes are mixed together with modern day philosophy from characters evolved with crime.