Dogfight

Rating: Null/10 (15 November 2017)

Suspicion and paranoia overwhelm a band of criminals after a tightly plotted heist goes sour in this feature film debut from Quentin Tarantino. The film is built on an interesting dynamic with none of the robbers actually knowing one another since they were all hired by a third party, given code names and were told to not tell each other their true identity. How much can they really trust each other's word and could one of them be a police informant? Intriguing as all this might sound, one's mileage with the movie is almost certain to vary depending on one's tolerance of the dialogue-heavy script. While some of the violence is quite brutal, there is precious little of it as the film mostly consists of the characters bantering back and forth, which unfortunately has a tendency to feel repetitive. The imbalanced time spent on each criminal's background feels a little odd too with some of them far more developed than others. All that said and done, the revelation of the police informant's identity is very well done and the second half of the film has many intense moments. The final few scenes are especially memorable with an outcome that resonates in the mind long after the film is over.