Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Why am I Mr. Pink?
THE SUMMARY: A botched diamond heist infiltrated by an undercover LAPD officer causes a criminal team of men with color-themed code names to turn on each other in a movie I want to like, but didn’t. I like Tarantino. I like Buscemi. I can appreciate this movie as a foundation for the careers of both, but watching it, I was begging for the end as much as the guys bleeding out were.
FROM MOVIE-PICKER ADAM: What do you mean you don't tip, ya cheap bastard? Besides being a classic Tarantino film, this movie explores interpersonal conflict, trust, and violence as the ultimate means of resolution. Who says there's no honor among thieves?
THE BEST:
I can respect the product for the budget: There are a couple of different ways to look at this movie - one is that it lacks variety and takes place almost entirely in a warehouse, but the other is what it’s able to achieve with an extremely limited budget. Reservoir Dogs’ budget was $1.2M. For perspective, 20 years later, Tarantino’s largest production by budget was Django Unchained at $100M. While this movie may be a little simple and repetitive in presentation, to create a gory crime story believably with so few resources is an achievement worthy of recognition. How did he do it? The only things cut worse than that cop’s ear were the corners: actors used their own clothes for the wardrobe. The warehouse was an old mortuary, an ironically fitting venue. Mr. Orange’s apartment was actually just the mortuary’s second floor.
Of course low budgets can’t always be overcome, and that low budget also has the consequence of never actually showing the heist, whether we believe it was an intentional style choice or not.
I can respect the many Tarantino talents: I recognize a man who wears many hats: writer, actor, director, producer, maker of the whole damn thing. I’m a big believer of the ‘if you want it done right, do it yourself’ philosophy, and Tarantino lives it maybe better than anybody else, at least in the movie business. I don’t have to love every piece of work to appreciate the workmanship.
I can respect it as a movie that would now be canceled: The movie’s humor is a little cheap, but these days it’d be a movie that would get everyone in it exiled from Hollywood. Casual N and F words all around. It’s certainly not the cleverest of writing, but I’ll take anything that pushes the overton window just a little wider.
Mr. Pink is a faggot
All the Reservoir Dogs N words
THE WORST:
Slow to start, then torturous to close: Reservoir Dogs goes from painfully slow, like banter about the meaning of Madonna’s lyrics or the undercover cop coaching himself up in his apartment mirror, to intensely painful, watching a guy get tortured and another bleed out until almost everyone is relieved of the agony save Mr. Pink, who makes off with the loot. I was either bored or wincing, but neither made for fun viewing. In either case, I just wanted it to be over.
I want to see the heist scene: It’s a movie about a big heist that never actually shows the big heist. Supposedly this was a deliberate stylistic choice to emphasize more subtle parts of a story, including dialogue, but I have to believe if money was no obstacle, an entirely different heist-inclusive movie would have been made. In prior reviews, I’ve written critically of ambiguous endings and other plot pieces left up to interpretation or imagination, and this case is no different. I don’t want to imagine a good story. That’s the writer’s job. I want to be told one.
Even if it was a stylistic decision not to show the heist and focus on dialogue instead, we get little dialogue description of what actually happened during the theft either. There’s plenty of dialogue about inconsequential things, and not enough dialogue about the entire point of the story.
Just tell me what the movie title means: Tarantino has never said, so just like the heist scene, use your imagination and choose your own adventure. There’s speculation that it was simply a misheard title of another movie. If so, I can relate - a misheard Simpsons quote is the origin for the ‘skagg’ moniker.
THE RATING: 2/5 Wickies. What I respect and what I enjoy are different things. I enjoyed very little watching this movie, and would not watch again.
YOUR RATING: Vote here ⬇
NEXT WEEK: Full Metal Jacket (1987)
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