This hour-and-a-half drama is full of tense stand-offs where we don’t know who’s going to die. I was on the edge of my seat the whole movie! This is by far one of Quentin Tarantino’s best films and the most simple. It involves a handful of crooks who suspect that one of them is an undercover cop after a robbery gone bad. It stars Michael Madsen, Harvey Keitel, Steve Buscemi, and Tim Roth. A lot of these guys weren’t well known, but Reservoir Dogs got them going with how serious and funny they were together on screen. Again, intensity!
The best thing about this film is that it keeps an active audience. It definitely kept me guessing who the cop was. And when I did find out, I wasn’t prepared to react to it. And Tarantino pulled our strings by killing off key characters unsuspectingly making us react to them. He is so good at telling us a story and getting us to care about the characters. This is a very important skill to have as a writer and a director.
One item here involving movie making methods in this film that makes Tarantino movies so good is that it’s non-linear. The film takes place after a diamond robbery and throughout the entire film we see flashbacks of all of the characters prior to the robbery. Most of the dialog from the characters after the robbery is about the robbery. See the trend? They talk about details, events, and doubts about the robbery giving us, the audience, a pretty good idea what happened. Some movies like “Vantage Point” (2008) attempt to go into different perspectives and non-linear approaches as “Reservoir Dogs”, but it got old and became a broken record. “Reservoir Dogs” is not a broken record. It’s an addictive puzzle.
Michael Madsen (L), Harvey Keitel (M), and Steve Buscemi (R) in “Reservoir Dogs”
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