Tarantino Lets His 'Dogs' Out in Testosterone-land!

Rating: 9/10 (23 April 2015)

Tarantino has an almost impenitent appetite for blood-spattered barbarism, we all know that. But in his gritty, brutal crime-caper Reservoir Dogs â€“ a tantalizing debut feature that put the name Quentin Tarantino into the cinematic spotlight - his testosterone level is off every chart, as he happily wallows in his own adolescent love of criminals, violence, and vulgarity. So much so that, the movie appears to be set in a theme park called 'Testosterone-land', where nature isn't only red in tooth and claw, it's black as the heart of man and dank as any rag and bone shop of the human spirit.
Tarantino gets things off to a spectacularly engrossing start, as Reservoir Dogs begins with the iconic sequence involving the coffee- shop banter of six morally ambiguous outlaws. Yes, they are meant to be an urban wild-bunch, but damn, if they aren't charming and charismatic! Decked out in matching black suits and thin black ties, they've been brought together by a mob kingpin specifically to pull off a heist, and they've been kept deliberately ignorant of one another's identities, knowing each other only by their color coded pseudonyms. The heist is to be a one-shot deal - one job and they scatter to the winds. Soon after masterful opening gabfest, when you start settling in with the idea that Tarantino has made a heist movie, he pulls a coup by skipping right over the robbery itself. Instead, it cuts straight to the aftermath, as we find our wolf-pack hole up in a warehouse after the heist goes belly up, each trying to figure out which one of them squawked to the police. Dissension and suspicion run high and soon, it becomes clear to the audience that at least one of these guys is a snitch, but which one?
Tarantino's glitziest stroke in his heist drama is never to show the main event: the film's 'action' occurs after the heist. Tarantino expertly builds tension, interweaving scenes of the aftermath of the thieves' foiled heist with scenes depicting them getting ready for the heist, backtracking in time and point of view half a dozen times. Each flashback reveals just enough information to fill in a piece of the puzzle. His palpable enthusiasm, his unapologetic passion for what he's created reinvigorates this venerable plot and, mayhem aside, makes it involving for longer than you might suspect. His trademarks of amplified violence and vulgar dialogue are in full force, as are the flurry of obscure to not-so-obscure pop culture references woven into the dialogue. Part of the appeal of Reservoir Dogs is the way it makes all of it feel terribly authentic, a veracity that is a tribute to the skill of its actors, particularly Michael Madsen who is awesome as the sadistic yet painfully cool Mr. Blonde and Steve Buscemi who is deadpan funny as the always-on-the- edge Mr. Pink.
Reservoir Dogs grabs you by the throat and digs its claws in deep. It may seem hideously ugly on paper, but in the sure way it's made, it's inconveniently dazzling - driven, beautifully made and completely wacko at once. It's pure outlaw art!