Mr. White, Mr. Orange, Mr. Blonde, Mr. Pink, Mr. Blue, and Mr. Brown. No, this is not the attendance sheet for an unsettling male adult band that plays children’s music—this is the fantastic ensemble cast of Quentin Tarantino’s debut 1992 cult hit, Reservoir Dogs!
The film details a screwed up diamond heist carried out by six of the coolest tuxedo-clad cons around. Tarantino himself stars, along with Harvey Keitel, Steve Buscemi, and Tim Roth (among others). Reservoir Dogs encompasses several scattered, non-linear narratives from the events after and leading up to the heist, and skips between these perspectives in a frenzy that matches the high stakes of the story.
Quentin Tarantino—just emerging from video clerk anonymity—is so confident in his singular vision of this bold crime movie that he is incapable of a false move. From the slick slow motion tracking shot to the utterly haunting use of Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You” perversely backing the famous torture sequence, to the opening scene with its rat-a-tat diner dialogue—Tarantino nails it. Rather than focus on the botched heist itself like other crime movies might tend toward, the story revolves around the characters and their gruff relationships. These men are intelligent but crude, and do not trust each other for a minute (hence the colorful aliases: by assigning these fake names, no one can rat anyone else out).
Beware: the violence is near constant, but quiet moments of meaningful exchanges and prolonged musings elevate the gore from senseless shock value to its own grungy art form. In earlier drafts of this column, I tried to pretentiously assign a deeper meaning or serious message to the ubiquitous violence, but it’s really not meant to be taken as anything except a stylistic aesthetic that Tarantino favors and uses to characterize his films.
Beneath the blood and laconic “cool hit man” veneer, Reservoir Dogs is about fleeting relationships; the kind of temporary, bittersweet relationship that sprouts from individuals having to begrudgingly coexist—like the detention-trapped teens of The Breakfast Club or the shark-hunting trio in Jaws. They certainly won’t be best friends forever, but these characters will walk away bound to each other by a shared experience.