The first Tarantino Classic

Rating: 8/10 (31 March 2019)

This is the film that spun Quentin Tarantino's long running career of gruesom and violent masterpieces. With this film, Tarantino has made his first classic, and it remains a classic to this day, and will continue to do so for a very long time.
A director's debut for Tarantino and he came off to a really great start with this immensly intruiging and different take ganster genre. With this piece Tarantino started sharpening his knife, and he had a real sharp one to begin with, but you can tell there are some rough edges still.
The movie starts off with all the main characters having coffee together, chatting, doing what Tarantino is best at. Having seemingly pointless scenes, but that actually establishes character. Here from the beginning you get a sense of who is the leader, the comedian, and who you might wanna look out for. Even forshadowing some events to the trained eye.
But here already can some of the rough edges be seen, as the dialogue isn't as sharp as some of his other movies, and the Tarantino-esque stories don't have quite the same sting in them. However it is forgivable, as it is infact his debut film, and it is overshadowed by the rest of the films brilliance.
The film is beautifully built up towards the ending, through tense interactions and clever glimses into the past. It is a bold move to play haywire with the script and have it go in a non-linear order, but in this sense it works really well, building up tension and unravelling more and more as we go. And it all leads up to the scintillating and brutal ending, that would set out to become one of Tarantino's trademarks. The only problem I had with the flashbacks was the character of Holdaway, who we don't get any introduction too. The only thing we get to know is that he is a buddy of one of the other characters (not to spoil anything) and that he helps him in his task. A more detailed introduction of him would have been needed, to not make his character seem somewhat unnecessary.
That said, the movie is very nicely done with little to no music, except for the songs playing on the radio, providing a raw touch to the film. It is not too long, as a story like this could easily have turned out boring with too many bland and boring scenes. Instead Tarantino has made sure every scene is counts and is of importance.
A genre defying movie, or rather, a genre making movie. As this movie falls under the gangster and crime, it also creates it's own genre, or should I say, Tarantino has. With his first film, Tarantino manages a clean birdie, and creates for himself his own genre: The Tarantino-genre.