October 6, 2010: Reservoir Dogs
I didn’t actually watch Reservoir Dogs (1992) all the way through on this occasion, but it’s a fairly short film and over the space of two days I watched enough of it to more or less count as a viewing. While the logic of this film can break down if you think about it too much, it’s an absolute thrill ride even all these years later.
I never really watched this film the first time I saw it, on video and only half paying attention. I remember the scenes in the car with Harvey Keitel and Tim Roth, and really nothing else. Reservoir Dogs is so much more than that. The first feature film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, this is the stripped-down kernel of the cool gangster milieu which he would go on to polish a couple of years later with Pulp Fiction, and which he has explored from different and strange angles in all of his films since. On the surface this is a typical story of small-time hoods pulling off a heist, but the colourful and combative characters, the explosive dialogue and the starkness of the violence were a shock to the system in a time when such stylized films as the Lethal Weapon series and a long string of tongue-in-cheek Arnold Schwarzenegger actioners defined the genre of action violence. The guys here are the epitome of coolness – Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Lawrence Tierney, even Steve Buscemi – but we get to see for which of them it’s a big puffed-up show, and for which of them it’s ingrained hotheadedness giving them their mojo. Of course the heist goes bad, and the pressure is on.
There can never be another movie like this. Set in the present-day at its time of release, it was an era when trends and fashions were “modern” but electronic technology was still relatively rudimentary. One member of the group carries a large cellphone, but otherwise everything is done with brains and guns. Nowadays everyone would be equipped with cellphones and would be texting (as was seen in The Departed in 2006), but Reservoir Dogs derives a great deal of its tension from the fact that the whereabouts of most of the team members are unknown until they walk through the door, and speculation is the name of the game. Even if a new film was set in that time period, it wouldn’t really ring true since recreating that time and its fashions and language couldn’t help but seem campy.
There’s one big leap of logic which must be believed in order to have this story hang together, and that’s believing that Keitel’s character could plausibly stick to his convictions right to the end of the film. I’ve found over the years that this conceit has become a bit thin, and it was distractingly so during this viewing, but the idea of this film and its construction and its dialogue remain solid enough that it doesn’t actually matter that much. Still, it can be hard to get past.
Reservoir Dogs is an unquestioned classic from the early 1990s, which kicked off an endless parade of copycat films which only intensified after the release of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction in 1994. What Pulp Fiction gives us in refinement, Reservoir Dogs gives us in rawness, and both films are essential to understanding how Quentin Tarantino revolutionized gangster films for the modern generation.
Groundbreaking heist film is still cool.
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