A True Original

Rating: 7/10 (30 October 2003)

SPOILERS.
There's no doubt about Quentin Tarentino's inventiveness. This was a real shocker when I first saw it several years ago. There had been violence before, but never so inexplicable. And gore before, but never gore quite so galore before. And that odd, quirky dialog -- alternately clumsy and adroit. It was obviously done on a small budget but did everything it was supposed to do and more.
A second viewing, along with some knowledge of Tarrentino's later work, deprives us of the shock but gives us a better perspective on the movie. A couple of things stand out.
One is that Tarrentino is like Howard Hawks in depriving his characters of any background. (That's about all he and Hawks have in common.) There have rarely been such rootless people wandering around on the screen. In this instance, there is a father/son pair, but nobody else has any family, few real friendships except those developed in the course of the narrative. There is no ethnic solidarity. Nobody has a home or a dog. Nobody has a job. Nobody has a girlfriend. These characters are like the ones Shakespeare warned us about, coming out of "air, thin air."
Another thing is the catholic derivativeness of the story and the scenes. Tarrentino may have made an art movie here but he's gobbled up bits and pieces of every kind of film imaginable, from superior stuff to schlock. The claustrophobic feeling of being cooped up in a warehouse with people you don't know and can't trust, he claims, was borrowed from Carpenter's junk version of "The Thing." The moment when everyone is pointing guns at everyone else, waiting for someone to fire first, seems to be from the climactic scene of "The Wild Bunch." The exclusive use of pop rock in the score has been done by Scorcese and others. But it's hard to be sure that these are borrowings because, to the extent they are, such borrowings have never seen in such multitudes and so nicely fitted together.
The big shootout, of the sort we saw in such detail in "Heat," is mostly off screen here, which saves money and doesn't cost the narrative much since it deals mainly with character and motivation and blood. The violence and the blood that follows can be a problem. The focus isn't on suffering, just pain and fear. People bleed enough to fill a bath tub. And that scene in which the bound cop is mutilated by Michael Madsen is a bit too-well set up and executed -- for me, anyway. And this is despite the fact that we don't know the cop, or any of the other characters really. These scenes are just shivers looking for spines to run up. Grown sadists and kids who don't know anxiety may enjoy it more.
Interesting anecdote. In an interview, Tarrentino describes how poor Lawrence Tierney was giving his big speech assigning the names of colors to the robbers -- "Mr. Orange, Mr. Pink", and so on. (Borrowed from "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.") Tierney kept forgetting his lines or blowing them and asking to start again from the top. The other actors were required to sit off screen without moving or changing expression. It took two hours for a satisfactory take. All of the other performers who had been sitting like stone idols all that time went suddenly into spasms of twitching, yawning, scratching, and moaning with relief.