Reservoir Dogs is a 1992 American crime thriller film and the feature-length debut of writer and director Quentin Tarantino. It features Harvey Keitel, Michael Madsen, Steve Buscemi, Chris Penn, Lawrence Tierney, Tim Roth, Tarantino, and criminal-turned-author Edward Bunker as members of a botched diamond heist which the film depicts the events before and after the heist. Kirk Baltz, Randy Brooks and Steven Wright also play supporting roles. It incorporates many themes that have become Tarantino's hallmarks: violent crime, pop culture references, profanity, and nonlinear storytelling.
The film has become regarded as a classic of independent film and a cult film. It was named "Greatest Independent Film of all Time" by Empire. Reservoir Dogs was generally well received, and the cast was praised by many critics. Although it was not given much promotion upon release, the film became a modest success in the United States after grossing $2.8 million against its $1.2 million budget. The film was more successful in the United Kingdom, grossing nearly £6.5 million, and it achieved higher popularity after the success of Tarantino's next film, Pulp Fiction (1994). A soundtrack was released featuring songs used in the film, which are mostly from the 1970s.
Plot
Eight men eat breakfast at a Los Angeles diner before carrying out a diamond heist. Six of them use aliases: Mr. Blonde, Mr. Blue, Mr. Brown, Mr. Orange, Mr. Pink, and Mr. White. The others are mob boss Joe Cabot and his son and underboss "Nice Guy" Eddie Cabot, who are responsible for planning the job.
After the heist, White flees the crime scene with Orange, who was shot during the escape and is bleeding severely. At one of Joe's warehouses, White and Orange rendezvous with Pink, who believes that the job was a setup and that the police were waiting for them. White informs him that Brown is dead, Blue and Blonde are missing, and Blonde murdered several civilians during the heist; White is furious that Joe, his old friend, would employ such a "psychopath". Pink has hidden the diamonds nearby; he argues with White over whether or not they should get medical attention for Orange. Blonde arrives with a kidnapped policeman, Marvin Nash.
Some time earlier, Blonde meets with the Cabots. Blonde has completed a four-year jail sentence. To reward him for not having given Joe's name to the authorities for a lighter sentence, they recruit him for the job.
In the present, White and Pink beat Nash for information. Eddie arrives and orders them to retrieve the diamonds and ditch the getaway vehicles, leaving Blonde in charge of Nash and Orange. Nash denies knowledge, but Blonde ignores him and resumes the torture, cutting off his ear with a straight razor. He is about to set Nash on fire, but is shot dead by Orange. Orange explains to Nash that he is an undercover police officer and that the police will arrive soon.
Hours earlier, Brown is shot and killed while escaping from the crime scene with Orange and White. When Orange and White attempt to steal another car, Orange is shot by the driver of the car, whom he shoots and kills in response.
In the present, when Eddie, Pink, and White return, Orange tries to convince them that Blonde planned to kill them and steal the diamonds for himself. Eddie kills Nash and accuses Orange of lying, since Blonde was loyal to his father to the point of doing a prison term instead of turning on him. Joe arrives with news that the police have killed Blue. He is about to execute Orange, but White intervenes and holds Joe at gunpoint. Eddie points his own weapon at White, creating a Mexican standoff. All three shoot; both Cabots are killed, and White and Orange are wounded.
Pink, the only person who has not been shot, takes the diamonds and flees. As White cradles the dying Orange in his arms, Orange confesses that he is a police officer. White holds his gun against Orange's head. The police storm the warehouse and order White to drop his gun. Gunshots sound.
Cast
Diamond heist members
- Harvey Keitel as Mr. White (Larry Dimmick)
- Tim Roth as Mr. Orange (Det. Freddie Newandyke)
- Michael Madsen as Mr. Blonde (Vic Vega)
- Steve Buscemi as Mr. Pink
- Chris Penn as "Nice Guy" Eddie Cabot
- Lawrence Tierney as Joe Cabot
- Quentin Tarantino as Mr. Brown
- Edward Bunker as Mr. Blue
Other
- Kirk Baltz as Marvin Nash
- Randy Brooks as Holdaway
- Steven Wright as the voice of K-Billy DJ
- Rich Turner, David Steen, Tony Cosmo, and Stevo Polly as sheriffs
- Michael Sottile as Teddy
- Robert Ruth as shot cop
- Lawrence Bender as young cop
- Linda Kaye Henning as "shocked woman"
- Suzanne Celeste as shot woman
- Bender, Laurie Lathem, Maria Strova, Burr Steers, and Craig Hamann as the background radio play voices
Production
Quentin Tarantino had been working at Video Archives, a video store in Manhattan Beach, California, and originally planned to shoot the film with his friends on a budget of $30,000 in a 16Â mm black-and-white format, with producer Lawrence Bender playing a police officer chasing Mr. Pink. Bender gave the script to his acting teacher, whose wife gave the script to Harvey Keitel. Keitel liked it enough to sign as a co-producer so Tarantino and Bender would have an easier job finding funding; with his assistance, they raised $1.5 million. Keitel also paid for Tarantino and Bender to host casting sessions in New York, where the duo found Steve Buscemi, Michael Madsen, and Tim Roth.
Reservoir Dogs was, according to Tarantino, influenced by Stanley Kubrick's The Killing. Tarantino said: "I didn't go out of my way to do a rip-off of The Killing, but I did think of it as my "Killing," my take on that kind of heist movie." The film's plot was suggested by the 1952 film Kansas City Confidential. Additionally, Joseph H. Lewis's 1955 film The Big Combo and Sergio Corbucci's 1966 Spaghetti Western Django inspired the scene where a police officer is tortured in a chair. Tarantino has denied that he plagiarized with Reservoir Dogs and instead said that he does homages. Having the main characters named after colors (Mr. Pink, White, Brown, etc.) was first seen in the 1974 film The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. The film also contains key elements similar to those found in Ringo Lam's 1987 film City on Fire.
Of his decision not to show the heist itself, Tarantino has said that the reason was initially budgetary but that he had always liked the idea of not showing it and stuck with that idea in order to make the details of the heist ambiguous. He has said that the technique allows for the realization that the film is "about other things", a similar plot outline that appears in the stage play Glengarry Glen Ross and its film adaptation in which the mentioned robbery is never shown on camera. Tarantino has compared this to the work of a novelist, and has said that he wanted the film to be about something that is not seen and that he wanted it to "play with a real-time clock as opposed to a movie clock ticking".
The title for the film came from a customer at the Video Archives, who requested Louis Malle’s 1987 film Au revoir les enfants, but mispronounced the title "Reservoir Dogs".
Reception
Box office
Reservoir Dogs premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1992. It became the festival's most talked-about film, and was subsequently picked up for distribution by Miramax Films. After being shown at several other film festivals, including in Cannes, Sitges and Toronto, Reservoir Dogs opened in the United States in 19 theaters with a first week total of $147,839. It was expanded to 61 theaters and totaled $2,832,029 at the domestic box office. The film grossed more than double that in the United Kingdom, where it was banned from home video release until 1995. During the period of unavailability on home video, the film was re-released in UK cinemas in June 1994.
Critical reception
Reservoir Dogs is regarded as an important and influential milestone of independent filmmaking. It has inspired many independent films and is considered important in the development of independent cinema. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 90% based on 62 reviews, with an average rating of 8.8/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Thrumming with intelligence and energy, Reservoir Dogs opens Quentin Tarantino's filmmaking career with hard-hitting style." On Metacritic the film had an average score of 78 out of 100, based on 23 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Empire magazine named it the "Greatest Independent Film" ever made.
At the film's release at the Sundance Film Festival, film critic Jami Bernard of the New York Daily News compared the effect of Reservoir Dogs to that of the 1895 film L'Arrivée d'un Train en Gare de la Ciotat, whereby audiences supposedly saw a moving train approaching the camera and ducked. Bernard said that Reservoir Dogs had a similar effect and people were not ready for it. Vincent Canby of The New York Times enjoyed the cast and the usage of non-linear storytelling. He similarly complimented Tarantino's directing and liked the fact that he did not often use close-ups in the film. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times also enjoyed the film and the acting, particularly that of Buscemi, Tierney and Madsen, and said "Tarantino's palpable enthusiasm, his unapologetic passion for what he's created, reinvigorates this venerable plot and, mayhem aside, makes it involving for longer than you might suspect." Critic James Berardinelli was of a similar opinion; he complimented both the cast and Tarantino's dialogue writing abilities. Hal Hinson of The Washington Post was also enthusiastic about the cast, complimenting the film on its "deadpan sense of humor".
Roger Ebert was less enthusiastic; he felt that the script could have been better and said that the film "feels like it's going to be terrific", but Tarantino's script does not have much curiosity about the characters. He also stated that "[Tarantino] has an idea, and trusts the idea to drive the plot." Ebert gave the film two and a half stars out of four and said that while he enjoyed it and that it was a very good film from a talented director, "I liked what I saw, but I wanted more." Ebert's biggest praise was the acting in the film.
The film has received substantial criticism for its strong violence and language. One scene that viewers found particularly unnerving was the ear-cutting scene; Madsen himself reportedly had great difficulty finishing it, especially after Kirk Baltz ad-libbed the desperate plea "I've got a little kid at home." Many people walked out during the film. During a screening at Sitges Film Festival, fifteen people walked out, including horror film director Wes Craven and special makeup effects artist Rick Baker. Baker later told Tarantino to take the walkout as a "compliment" and explained that he found the violence unnerving because of its heightened sense of realism. Tarantino commented about it at the time: "It happens at every single screening. For some people the violence, or the rudeness of the language, is a mountain they can't climb. That's OK. It's not their cup of tea. But I am affecting them. I wanted that scene to be disturbing."
Critical analysis
Reservoir Dogs has often been seen as a prominent film in terms of on-screen violence. J.P. Telotte compared Reservoir Dogs to classic caper noir films and points out the irony in its ending scenes. Mark Irwin also made the connection between Reservoir Dogs and classic American noir. Caroline Jewers called Reservoir Dogs a "feudal epic" and paralleled the color pseudonyms to color names of medieval knights.
Critics have observed parallels between Reservoir Dogs and other films. For its nonlinear storyline, Reservoir Dogs has often been compared to Rashomon. Critic John Hartl compared the ear-cutting scene to the shower murder scene in Psycho and Tarantino to David Lynch. He furthermore explored parallels between Reservoir Dogs and Glengarry Glen Ross. Todd McCarthy, who called the film "undeniably impressive", was of the opinion that it was influenced by Mean Streets, Goodfellas and The Killing. After this film, Tarantino himself was also compared to Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah, John Singleton, Gus Van Sant, and Abel Ferrara.
A frequently cited comparison has been to Tarantino's second and more successful film Pulp Fiction, especially since the majority of audiences saw Reservoir Dogs after the success of Pulp Fiction. Comparisons have been made regarding the black humor in both the films, the theme of accidents, and more concretely, the style of dialogue and narrative style that Tarantino incorporates into both films. Specifically the relationship between whites and blacks plays a big part in the filmsâ€"though underplayed in Reservoir Dogs. Stanley Crouch of The New York Times compared the way the white criminals speak of black people in Reservoir Dogs to the way they are spoken of in Scorsese's Mean Streets and Goodfellas. Crouch observed the way black people are looked down upon in Reservoir Dogs, but also the way that the criminals accuse each other of "verbally imitating" black men and the characters' apparent sexual attraction to black actress Pam Grier.
In February 2012, as part of an ongoing series of live dramatic readings of film scripts being staged with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), director Jason Reitman cast black actors in the originally white cast: Laurence Fishburne as Mr. White; Terrence Howard as Mr. Blonde; Anthony Mackie as Mr. Pink; Cuba Gooding Jr. as Mr. Orange; Chi McBride as Joe Cabot; Anthony Anderson as Nice Guy Eddie (Joe Cabot's son); Common as both Mr. Brown and Officer Nash (the torture victim of Mr. Blonde), and Patton Oswalt as Holdaway (the mentor cop who was originally played by a black actor in the film). Critic Elvis Mitchell suggested that Reitman's version of the script was taking the source material back to its roots since the characters "all sound like black dudes."
Accolades
The film was screened out of competition at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival. It won the Critic's Award at the 4th Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival in February 1993 which Tarantino attended. The film was also nominated for the prestigious Grand Prix of the Belgian Syndicate of Cinema Critics. Steve Buscemi won the 1992 Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Male. Reservoir Dogs ranks at No. 97 in Empire magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Films of All Time.
Home media
In the United Kingdom, the release of VHS rental video was delayed until 1995 due to the British Board of Film Classification initially refusing the film a home video certificate (UK releases are required to be certified separately for theatrical release and for viewing at home). The latter is a requirement by law due to the Video Recordings Act 1984. Following the UK VHS release approval, Polygram released a "Mr Blonde Deluxe Edition", which included an interview with Tarantino and several memorabilia associated with the character Mr. Blonde, such as sunglasses and a chrome toothpick holder.
Region 1 DVDs of Reservoir Dogs have been released multiple times. The first release was a single two-sided disc from LIVE Entertainment, released in June 1997 and featuring both pan-and-scan and letterbox versions of the film. Five years later, Artisan Entertainment (who changed their name from LIVE Entertainment in the interim) released a two-disc 10th anniversary edition featuring multiple covers color-coded to match the nicknames of five of the characters (Pink, White, Orange, Blonde and Brown) and a disc of bonus features such as interviews with the cast and crew.
For the film's 15th anniversary, Lionsgate (which had purchased Artisan in the interim) produced a two-disc anniversary edition with a remastered 16:9 transfer and a new supplement, but not all of the extra features from the 10th Anniversary edition. In particular, interviews with the cast and crew were removed, and a new 48-minute-long feature called "Tributes and Dedications" was included. The packaging for the 15th anniversary edition is fancier: the discs are enclosed in a large matchbook, and the matchbook is in a thin aluminum case made to resemble a gas can.
Soundtrack
The Reservoir Dogs: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack was the first soundtrack for a Quentin Tarantino film and set the structure his later soundtracks would follow. This includes the extensive use of snippets of dialogue from the film. The soundtrack has selections of songs from the 1960s to '80s. Only the group Bedlam recorded original songs for the film. Reasoning that the film takes place over a weekend, Tarantino decided to set it to a fictional radio station 'K-Billy' (presumably KBLY)'s show "K-Billy's Super Sounds of the Seventies Weekend", a themed weekend show of broadcasts of songs from the seventies. The radio station played a prominent role in the film. The DJ for the radio was chosen to be Steven Wright, a comedian known for his deadpan delivery of jokes.
An unusual feature of the soundtrack was the choice of songs; Tarantino has said that he feels the music to be a counterpoint to the on-screen violence and action. He also stated that he wished for the film to have a 1950s feel while using '70s music. A prominent instance of this is the torture scene to the tune of "Stuck in the Middle with You".
Bedlam was a 1990s rock group from Nashville fronted by Jay Joyce, who were signed to MCA Records. Their album Into the Coals was released in 1992. Further members were Chris Feinstein (bass) and Doug Lancio. "Magic Carpet Ride" is a cover of the 1968 Steppenwolf song. "Harvest Moon" is written by Jay Joyce.
Sandy Rogers' "Fool for Love" initially was title song to Robert Altman's 1985 film Fool for Love.
- Track listing
- "And Now Little Green Bag..." â€" dialogue extract performed by Steven Wright (0:15)
- "Little Green Bag" â€" The George Baker Selection (3:15)
- "Rock Flock of Five" â€" dialogue extract performed by Steven Wright (0:11)
- "Hooked on a Feeling" â€" Blue Swede (2:53)
- "Bohemiath" â€" dialogue extract performed by Steven Wright (0:34)
- "I Gotcha" â€" Joe Tex (2:27)
- "Magic Carpet Ride" â€" Bedlam (5:10)
- "Madonna Speech" â€" dialogue extract performed by Quentin Tarantino, Edward Bunker, Lawrence Tierney, Steve Buscemi, and Harvey Keitel (0:59)
- "Fool for Love" by Sandy Rogers (3:25)
- "Super Sounds" â€" dialogue extract performed by Steven Wright (0:19)
- "Stuck in the Middle with You" â€" Stealers Wheel (3:23)
- "Harvest Moon" â€" Bedlam (2:38)
- "Let's Get a Taco" â€" dialogue extract performed by Harvey Keitel and Tim Roth (1:02)
- "Keep on Truckin'" â€" dialogue extract performed by Steven Wright (0:16)
- "Coconut" â€" Harry Nilsson (3:50)
- "Home of Rock" â€" dialogue extract performed by Steven Wright (0:05)
Video game
A video game based on the film was released in 2006 for PC, Xbox, and PlayStation 2. However, the game does not feature the likeness of any of the actors with the exception of Michael Madsen. GameSpot called it "an out and out failure". It caused controversy for its amount of violence and was banned in Australia and New Zealand.
Another video game, Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days, was released in 2017.
Remakes
Kaante, a Bollywood film released in 2002, is a remake of Reservoir Dogs. The film's central plot is based on Tarantino's film, and also borrows plot points from The Usual Suspects and Heat. Tarantino has been quoted as saying that Kaante is his favorite among the many rip-offs of his film.
See also
- The Day of the Wolves, a 1971 movie.
- The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, a 1974 movie.
References
External links
- Official website
- Reservoir Dogs on Internet Movie Database
- Reservoir Dogs at the TCM Movie Database
- Reservoir Dogs at AllMovie
- Reservoir Dogs at Box Office Mojo
- Reservoir Dogs at Rotten Tomatoes
- Reservoir Dogs at Metacritic