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Quentin Tarantino came out of nowhere (i.e., a video store in Manhattan Beach, California) and turned Hollywood on its ear in 1992 with his explosive first feature, Reservoir Dogs. Like Tarantino's mainstream breakthrough Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs has an unconventional structure, cleverly shuffling back and forth in time to reveal details about the characters, experienced criminals who know next to nothing about each other. Joe (Lawrence Tierney) has assembled them to pull off a simple heist, and has gruffly assigned them color-coded aliases (Mr. Orange, Mr. Pink, Mr. White) to conceal their identities from being known even to each other. But something has gone wrong, and the plan has blown up in their faces. One by one, the surviving robbers find their way back to their prearranged warehouse hideout. There, they try to piece together the chronology of this bloody fiasco--and to identify the traitor among them who tipped off the police. Pressure mounts, blood flows, accusations and bullets fly. In the combustible atmosphere these men are forced to confront life-and-death questions of trust, loyalty, professionalism, deception, and betrayal. As many critics have observed, it is a movie about "honor among thieves" (just as Pulp Fiction is about redemption, and Jackie Brown is about survival). Along with everything else, the movie provides a showcase for a terrific ensemble of actors: Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi, Michael Madsen, Christopher Penn, and Tarantino himself, offering a fervent dissection of Madonna's "Like a Virgin" over breakfast. Reservoir Dogs is violent (though the violence is implied rather than explicit), clever, gabby, harrowing, funny, suspenseful, and even--in the end--unexpectedly moving. (Don't forget that "Super Sounds of the Seventies" soundtrack, either.) Reservoir Dogs deserves just as much acclaim and attention as its follow-up, Pulp Fiction, would receive two years later. --Jim Emerson
Customer Review: Quentin Tarantino's debut masterpiece
Never has such a movie with so much talking and so little action has given me such a rush like this movie. Quentin Tarantino's Resevoir Dogs is an example of the way movies should be these days. This movie doesn't get by with over the top action sequences and bloody fist fights like most other crime based movies do( don't get me wrong, there are quite a few gun fights in this movie) but instead gives us a well structured movie showing the aftermath of an almost failed diamond heist. The plot of the movie is pretty basic: A group of guys team up together under a crime boss and plan to rob a bank to get their hands on some priceless diamonds. the way this plot is shown, however is what makes this movie so different from other crime movies. the movie starts off with the color code named theives sitting at a restaurant casually talking amongst themselves before the heist and then switches suddenly to the aftermath of the heist. Like most other Tarantino movies events don't always happen in the correct order for example showing things that happen before the heist directly after scenes taking place after the heist and its this kind of unique pacing that puts Resevoir Dogs apart from other movies in the same genre. And of course we can't overlook the great acting for this movie. Harvey Kietel, Michael Madsen, Steve Buscemi, and other big name actors enter this movie and each one in my opinion is a great actor. These actors are so well in this movie that you can feel the emotion that their onscreen counterparts are potraying and it's very refreshing to see such good actors in this movie. So if you're a fan of other Tarantino movies then by all means pick this one up. I promise you won't regret it.
Customer Review: Quentin's best film....great the first time...
When I saw this film, I really liked it. It was visceral, interesting, and unforgettable. It's a film of great style, but it's completely void of substance and has no depth. While you marvel at it the first time, subsequent viewings reveal that it is really a shallow piece of cinema, and hollow to its very core. It indulges in its violence, while pretending to have the characters care about each other. The "friendship" between Tim Roth and Harvey Keitel's characters isn't believable at all. There's merely one scene in which they look at the bank they're going to rob, make a joke about a chick, say "let's get a taco", and that's it. Now we're supposed to believe their friends, and that Keitel is willing to die for his friend. One would hardly think this would form a bond so strong. It's almost like Quentin said "ok, they have to have a bonding scene here", and he thought of the most generic one he could think of. The out of time structure is not especially original, as it has been done before (and much better) in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America, Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, and Clint Eastwood's Bird). Some of the characters have that arrogant smugness that permeated many films in the 1990's as well. So, is it still good? Yes, you should see it once or twice, but don't expect to resonate over the years like great films usually do...


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