An incredible debut from Tarantino

Rating: 8/10 (12 January 2017)

Quentin Tarantino did not miss his debut with this one. He wrote and directed Reservoir Dogs which premiered at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival. A lot of great movies have premiered at this festival but 'Dogs' will probably remain the most famous passage. Although, 'The Usual Suspects' and 'Memento' are better movies, in my opinion. 'Reservoir Dogs' stars the great Steve Buscemi, Tim Roth, Harvey Keitel, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn, Lawrence Tierney and Tarantino himself.
The cast is simply terrific, everyone is great in this movie. This is of course partly due to the many talents in the cast but also because of the great dialogue and characters. Michael Madsen's character in particular will stay with you forever. The 'Stuck In The Middle With You' scene is brilliant and horrific. Tarantino is at this day still a controversial director, and it all started with this movie and this scene. It's a shame that the violence gets so much attention in Tarantino's movies, because it shouldn't. The violence serves the story, and is in fact essential to the movie.
Reservoir Dogs is a crime movie but isn't your average crime movie. The opening scene is a banal, but funny dialogue between the 'Reservoir Dogs'. It sets up the characters brilliantly and shows that the movie is going to be entirely different from what you might expect to get out of a crime movie. Dialogue is the core of every Tarantino movie. In 'Dogs' this becomes clear right from the start. The dialogue in this movie is however not the best Tarantino has written. Great dialogue builds character or introduces characters, serves the plot, is interesting, and does this without being straightforward. Every line of dialogue in this movie was interesting, it always is with Tarantino. But sometimes it didn't serve the plot and merely confirmed what we already knew about the characters. But of course, it was still interesting, entertaining and incredibly funny.
'Reservoir Dogs' deserves to be called a classic. Tarantino's debut was so innovative to the movie industry that it will remain a classic forever. Reservoir Dogs will never cease to be relevant. Tarantino's potential is shown in every aspect of the movie. He was however not yet the film maker he is today, in my opinion. The bar scene in 'Inglorious Bastards' is one of the smartest scenes he has ever written. The level of suspense of opening (milk) scene of that movie hasn't been matched very often in movie history. In my opinion 'Pulp Fiction' is still his best and even though 'Reservoir Dogs' is absolutely great and innovative, I don't give this one a higher rating because there was still room for progress, in Tarantino's standards. In his next movies he achieved this progress.