Reservoir Dogs

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The cuss-oriented squabbles of lowlife crooks for 99 minutes (and no women) RELEASED IN 1992 and written/directed by Quentin Tarantino, "Reservoir Dogs” is a crime drama/thriller about a diamond heist gone disastrously wrong in Los Angeles wherein the surviving thugs bicker back-and-forth in a warehouse about which of their members is a police informant. The main thieves are played by Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi, Michael Madsen and Chris Penn while Lawrence Tierney appears as the old salt mastermind. This was Tarantino’s first feature film, costing only $1,200,000, and it has quirky glimmerings of future greatness, as seen in “Pulp Fiction” (1994), “Jackie Brown” (1997), “Kill Bill” (2003/2004), “Inglourious Basterds” (2009) and “Django Unchained” (2012), but “Reservoir” didn’t work for me. It’s hampered by a low-budget vibe, which I can handle, but not the uninteresting lowlife characters, their self-made conundrum, their interminably dull dialogue and the one-dimensional setting where about 80% of the story takes place in an old warehouse, not to mention no females in the main cast. Still, it’s interesting to observe Tarantino’s first serious stab at filmmaking and it has its moments of genuine entertainment. It’s a lesson on humble beginnings, which shows potential while not being up to snuff. THE FILM RUNS 1 hour, 39 minutes and was shot in Los Angeles & Burbank. GRADE: C-

Nope, I didn't get the memo... After a jewellery heist goes wrong and the escaping funeral-attired hoodlums kill a couple of cops and one gets gut-shot in a car-jacking, they return to their hideout where they turn on each other with expletive-ridden venom. What now ensues is a recreation of the planning and execution of their raid, their introductions to each other and that all lays the seeds for this over-rated drama of brutal mistrust and duplicity. Tim Roth probably stands out as "Mr. Orange" but the rest of the fairly well established cast offer us little by way of sophistication or subtlety as they try to decide which - if any of them - informed the police. It's violent but so what - it's not Scorsese, nor does the story really hold up after it becomes glaringly obvious what is actually going to happen at the end. Quentin Tarantino's directorial debut has shock value, certainly, but I'm afraid I found the whole thing really quite dull. Sorry - but there's more to good writing and characterisation that loads of effing, jeffing, charm-free thuggery and bullets. Not for me!

This unique take on the heist-film-gone-wrong was excellent--stylish and intelligently made, yet very funny and inexpensive. Tarantino's accolades from giving American cinema the resuscitation it needed mirrors what has happened, at least since the 70's, with Martin Scorsese's 'Mean Streets', both in terms of entertaining violence and usage of music in the scoring of films. I greatly thank Harvey Keitel for taking a chance on Tarantino back then--It paid off in spades.