Quentin Tarantino's raw and fierce film debut!

Rating: 10/10 (17 March 2020)

I just want to start by saying, I am the father of two young boys who love movies. Everything from The Lion King to the Matrix Trilogy to the Lord of the Rings trilogy they absolutely love. As this is one of my all time favorites, Many, many times have I been tempted to put on Reservoir Dogs for them to watch, only my wife continuously comments on its R rating saying it's a bad idea. I first saw this movie in the year 2000 when I was only 10 years old. I'm a 90's kid at heart but Reservoir Dogs was one movie that well and truly slipped under my radar before I hit ten years old. It's funny in retrospect because suddenly as the year 2000 hit the scene all these amazing films suddenly started springing out at me. two of these movies was Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction..... I came across Reservoir Dogs in the video store one day and thought it had a cool front cover, My mother was hesitant to rent it out for me due to the R rating but she rented it out for me anyway as it didn't say anything about "sex scenes".... whenever my mother would rent a movie out for me she was fairly easy going as long as it didn't have sex scenes in it.
Reservoir Dogs has no sex scenes and in no way, shape or form, does it need them. Set in LA, Following the aftermath of a jewelry heist gone wrong due to being setup by police, the remaining thieves who managed to survive the ordeal (an intense chase and shootout with police), end up back at their original rendezvous point, a dank, dirty, empty, depressing looking warehouse. It's there that they start to realize they've got a "rat in the house" and start arguing the point over who's the rat, who's not the rat, whether they should leave or not due to the cops narrowing in on their location. Mr Blonde (Michael Madsen) is one of the most brilliantly portrayed psychotic killers ever seen on screen, he shows no emotion whatsoever at the concept of torture. He hates cops (due toi being jailed for something he wasn't even guilty of), and QT makes sure he goes out of his way at showing this aspect of Mr Blondes personality.
Mr Orange who is the undercover cop (played by Tim Roth), gets his fair share of back story, showing how he gets to meet up with Joe and Nice Guy Eddy and ends up in their crew for the heist, rehearsing the story with a police co-worker he's going to sell to them to gain their trust. The heist backfires for him as well as he is shot in the process of a carjacking, leaving Mr White (Harvey Keitel) to accept responsibility as his carer while he tries relentlessly to get him to a hospital without arousing police suspicion.
The thing I love most about Reservoir dogs despite its rugged and raw nature is the fact that it's all about a heist the audience DOES NOT get to see. We only get to experience the fallout of the aftermath and it adds to the films personality. We as the audience are forced into picturing or imagining in our minds what went down during the heist. We get all the details about the heist from the characters dialogue in the aftermath and we start piecing together in our own minds what happened.... When the film begins it's all the heist members sitting around a table in a restaurant having breakfast. the first voice we hear is none other than the man himself Quentin Tarantino discussing the subject matter of a certain Madonna song, only being interrupted by all the other heist members over everything under the sun. The heist happens after this scene (which we dont see), and it's straight to Mr White taking care of a badly injured Mr Orange.
Reservoir Dogs was made from a very robust and adult style of gangster film making. Ranking right up there with the likes of Scarface, Casino and The Godfather movies, QT knew exactly what film he wanted to make and flat out went with it. No one was going to hold him back for his film debut. For someone who was a former video store clerk, he sure did a hell of a job on his first feature film. it's very raw, very violent, full of bad language, and develops the characters perfectly without giving them too much attention to detail. A terrific film in every aspect.