For all the hoopla and controversy surrounding Quentin Tarantino’s directorial debut, Reservoir Dogs is, at its bloody, tough-guy heart, a thin little film, gorgeous though it may be. This story about the explosive aftermath of a diamond heist gone awry tends to rely more on placing its violently manly characters in direct, nail-spitting conflict with one another than it does with any actual narrative story. This works like a charm in spots, but in others you may find yourself saying, “well, get on with it, already.” Tarantino uses flashbacks to show how these six uber-macho crooks wander into a set-up and, as things begin to unravel around them back at their hideout, explode into paranoid fits of petty rage and vindictiveness. Madsen’s Mr. Blonde (they’ve all been given color-coordinated code names to reduce the risks of using their real names) turns out to be a bona fide psychotic, dragging a cop back to the hideout as a hostage and then torturing him while the crazily appropriate Seventies hit “Stuck in the Middle With You” plays in the background. Coen Brothers refugee Steve Buscemi (“Mr. Pink? Why do I have to be Mr. Pink? Can’t I be, say, Mr. Purple, or something?”) is terrific, and the first one to smell a rat in the works. When he asks Mr. Blonde if he killed anyone in the melee, Blonde replies that he offed a couple of cops. “Any real people?” prompts Mr. Pink. “No. Just cops.” Lines like that pretty much characterize where Tarantino’s going with this story of male-disbonding. Only Keitel’s Mr. White comes across with any sort of thieves’ honor, cradling his gut-shot buddy and whispering “come on, who’s a tough guy….who’s a tough guy?” Despite the sometimes annoying fact that you can read Tarantino’s influences like a book — Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, Kubrick’s The Killing, Scorsese’s Mean Streets — Reservoir Dogs is undeniably one of the most striking and sure-footed debuts since Joel and Ethan Coen’s Blood Simple. It’s a relentlessly male film, with literally no female characters, a modern-day heist film chock-full of blood and testosterone, and though its reach sometimes exceeds its grasp, Tarantino has created a movie with all the gritty punch of a .44 in the belly.
This article appears in October 30 • 1992 (Cover).