The League of Gentlemen (1960), this is not

Rating: 6/10 (19 November 2007)

There have been many caper movies that include a heist, probably too many for the crime genre. Among them is the one mentioned in my summation line, plus  for the modern set - Oceans 11, 12 and 13 (give me a break, puleese) and for those who remember where it all started: The Asphalt Jungle (1950); Rififi, the Jules Dassin classic from 1955; and, later, Pekinpah's ode to violence, The Getaway (1972), Steve McQueens's best role.
The common theme, of course, is how some rat in the ranks makes everything turn sour for the others.
There are two things that make this one different to the others: the violence exceeds all those mentioned (and probably all other heist movies) and the narrative is deliberately fractured by the writer/director (Tarantino) as a means of creating suspense for the viewer.
As an experiment in using that plot device, it works: the story is terribly fractured, making it just a bit more difficult to get the picture first time round. The long list of FAQs for this one is mute evidence in support. When I saw the film in 1992, for the first time, I was intrigued but also disappointed. Seeing it again on DVD, I think Tarantino sacrificed clarity for the sake of speeding up the action  because, being such a talky film, he had to keep the action going to appease the audience. This, after all, was a diamond heist that went wrong, not a garage sale for diamonds...
Some might argue that the violence is excessive. I disagree, mainly because Tarantino very explicitly laid out what types of men these were during the overly long talkfest at the lunch feast: misogynist, narrow-minded, callous, racist and psychotic  but, in an exchange completely at odds with those attitudes, showed them dipping in to help out the waitress with a big tip. The only reason for that must be to show just how different Mr Pink (Steve Buscemi) is to the rest - which is important throughout this narrative.
So, the violence that follows is quite in character for all of them, even for Mr Orange (Tim Roth) who shoots a woman who shoots him, as he and Mr White (Harvey Keitel) steal her car. I think Tarantino did a good job in showing just how violent these violent people can be, leaving the viewer with an implied lesson, of course: don't do crime, or crime will do you!
It was great to Lawrence Tierney again - even though he was almost impossible to recognize (playing the Big Boss, Joe Cabot) as I'd seen him in many B movies in my youth.
In the end, however, I'd didn't care two hoots for any of the characters, except for Officer Nash (Kirk Baltz), the only person with real courage and honour, as he refused to reveal who the rat was.
This was the first Tarantino film I saw. It's not his best. If you want that, see Jackie Brown (1997), an Elmore Leonard novel that Tarantino puts to film very well.