Review: "RESERVOIR DOGS" is Still Running These Mean Streets

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 20 of 2024 (No. 1964) by Leroy Douresseaux

Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Running time:  99 minutes (1 hour, 39 minutes)

MPAA – R for strong violence and language

DIRECTOR:  Quentin Tarantino

WRITER:  Quentin Tarantino

PRODUCER:  Lawrence Bender

CINEMATOGRAPHER:  Andrzej Sekula

EDITOR:  Sally Menke

DRAMA/CRIME

Starring:  Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi, Lawrence Tierney, Randy Brooks, Kirk Baltz, Edward Bunker, Quentin Tarantino, and (voice) Steven Wright

Reservoir Dogs is a 1992 drama and crime film from writer-director Quentin Tarantino.  It is Tarantino's debut film and is the film that brought him to the attention of movie audiences, film critics, and movie studios.  Reservoir Dogs focuses on the aftermath of jewelry heist gone wrong as each surviving criminal tries to find out which of his cohorts is a police informant.

Reservoir Dogs opens in a diner and introduces eight gangsters.  The boss is Joe Cabot (Lawrence Tierney), and he and his son, “Nice Guy” Eddie Cabot (Chris Penn), are plotting the heist of jewelry store that has obtained some pricey, fine-cut diamonds.  Joe has put together a crew to pull off what seems like a routine robbery, and he has given them nicknames or aliases so that they don't know each other's “Christian names.”

Larry Dimmick (Harvey Keitel) is “Mr. White.”  Freddy Newendyke (Tim Roth) is “Mr. Orange.”  “Toothpick” Vic Vega (Michael Madsen) is “Mr. Blonde.”  The other three are “Mr. Pink” (Steve Buscemi), “Mr. Blue” (Edward Bunker), and “Mr. Brown” (Quentin Tarantino).

However, the heist turns out not to be routine because it was like the cops were waiting for them.  Now, two of the six robbers are dead.  Four of them are hold-up in a warehouse.  One of them is grievously wounded, and one of them has shown up with a young police officer, Marvin Nash (Kirk Baltz), he kidnapped.  If they are going to make it out of their current predicament, however, they are going to have to discover which of them ratted the rest out to the police.

This year is the thirtieth anniversary of the original theatrical release of Quentin Tarantino's most famous film, Pulp Fiction.  It's also the 30th anniversary of the film's debut at the 47th Cannes Film Festival.  Before I take a look at that film in its entirety for the first time in thirty years, I decided to go back and watch Reservoir Dogs in its entirety for the first time in over thirty years.

Over the last few decades, I have seen many films referred to as “neo-noir,” because they are modern versions of “Film-Noir.”  This term refers to the stylized Hollywood dramas – especially crime dramas – of the 1930s to the 1960s.  The 1940s and 1950s are seen as the classic period of Film-Noir.  I believe that Reservoir Dogs is legitimately neo-noir because it recalls two of my favorite Film-Noir classics, John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956), especially the latter of which Reservoir Dogs borrows several ideas and elements.  Early on, it is also clear that the nonlinear narrative that Tarantino uses in Reservoir Dogs is similar to that of Akira Kurosawa's classic period drama, Rashomon (1950).

Reservoir Dogs introduces audiences to what would become Tarantino narrative hallmarks:  pop culture references; gory violence, hard-hitting action, nonlinear storytelling, and a heady mixture of songs from the 1960s and 1970s.  In this case, the music is introduced by an unseen radio DJ, K-Billy, voiced by comedian and actor, Steven Wright.  At the time, however, those didn't feel like hallmarks.  They were new, and over thirty years later, they still feel new, not like things that are now director trademarks which in many ways define Tarantino's career and process.  Even watching the film now, I see them as clever flourishes from a young director with a lot of potential.

Yes, the dialogue does not always sparkle, but every moment of this film bursts with potential even.  That is true even when the nonlinear storytelling reveals that the entire process of the jewelry store heist seems like a thing inadvertently built on a house of holes.

Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, and Steve Buscemi provide the strong performances that often keep Reservoir Dogs from seeming like a shallow work of plagiarisms.  The bring depth, weight, and substance to ideas that might falter in the hands of lesser talents.  Chris Penn and Lawrence Tierney make for a believable father-son duo, and the film's lone Black actor, Randy Brooks, as the police official, Holdaway, dominates every scene in which he appears.

Thirty-two years later, I am now wondering why I haven't watched Reservoir Dogs more often.  It, along with Tarantino's next two feature films, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown (1997), form Tarantino's purest filmmaking period.  Without the big budgets he would get in his twenty-first century films, he had to be clever about the places he flexed himself, whereas now he can indulge his every whim.  His characters were vulnerable and living on the margins as regular people, low-level criminals, and cheap hoods.  In his films of the last two decades, the characters are flashy anti-heroes and rebels played by some of Hollywood biggest stars.  Reservoir Dogs has not aged well simply because it has not aged.  It still feels like a star recently born.

8 of 10

A

★★★★ out of 4 stars

Thursday, May 2, 2024

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