Thoughts on Reservoir Dogs (1991) · 6:48pm Dec 19th, 2023
(First watched September 7th, 2023.)
Watched this with my dad as I was curious to finally see what the fuss was about.
I am mostly familiar with Quentin Tarantino through osmosis. I've seen Pulp Fiction (which I liked) and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (which I also liked, but have heard is atypical for his usual output).
I think I liked this one more than Dad did but that's still pretty close. I did not love this movie, and I think the "problem" for me was that I already knew some of the most famous bits already: the heist falls apart, the guys turn on each other, one of them is a cop in hiding, there's a torture scene with dissonant music playing... all of which is well acted but I'd been spoiled by general knowledge, and parodies in particular. (When watching the torture scene and the "it amuses me to torture a cop" line, my brain kept jumping to a parody of said scene I'd read once.)
That being said, I did think the movie had some interesting elements to it. The emphasis on the warehouse setting, and the majority of events taking place there, as well as the importance of dialogue, gave the movie an interestingly "theatrical" vibe and made me wonder if anyone had ever tried to make a stage play out of this story. While my dad disliked that we never saw how the robbery went sideways, I did think that it was an interesting aspect to the story.
(It did strike me as kinda amusing as well that "Mr. Pink," Steve Buscemi's character, is the guy who's stuck trying to get everyone else to be professional when they're all pointing guns at each other. For an actor I mostly know for being typecast as slimy villains, this is a role where he's not a good guy, but still makes the inarguable point that murdering each other when the job's gone bad is lousy thinking.)
All in all, glad I saw this, even if it won't be my favorite any time soon. Always good to get some context for a movie and its place in pop culture.
Okay but did they manage to get the dogs out of the reservoir or is this another one of those movies where the dog dies at the end?
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Haha, good one.