Six Strangers, One Snitch
Tarantino's directing debut, Reservoir Dogs, is about a group of men brought together by a common goal: robbing a jewellery store. The brain of the operation, Joe (Lawrence Tierney), together with his son and "business partner" Nice Guy Eddie (Chris Penn), invite six men into the job. For safety, Joe assigns them fake names and forbids any chit-chat about personal life. And so Mr. Brown (Quentin Tarantino), Mr. White (Harvey Keitel), Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen), Mr. Blue (Edward Bunker), Mr. Orange (Tim Roth), and Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi) are set on a course that will destroy every one of them.
Tarantino familiarises us with the events in reverse. We jump straight into the middle of the robbery to discover that not everything went according to plan, and from there the film works backwards and sideways at once. Trapped between causes and effects, we — along with the characters bleeding out on the warehouse floor — are trying to figure out exactly what happened, and, most importantly, who is the snitch.
Trapped between the causes and effects, along with the characters, we are trying to figure out exactly what happened — and most importantly, who is the snitch.
Tarantino's now-famous brutal scenes, with their outrageous quantities of blood, are not for weak stomachs. They're for mature viewers — the kind who also appreciate the outstanding acting demanded by the film's long, static, nowhere-to-hide shots, and who enjoy being blindsided by a story that keeps turning corners it never announced, all of it scored to a soundtrack pulled from the '60s through the '80s.
I, personally, couldn't have asked for more on that foggy evening when we watched Reservoir Dogs. Great film.
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