When I saw the trailer for this three decades ago before it turned up in local arthouses, it looked like a stylish retro piece recalling '70s heist movies from California or Hong Kong: tough snappy dialogue and action with flair. The song playing under the trailer was to become glued to the film's most notorious scene, Stealer's Wheel's Dylanesque classic Stuck in the Middle with You. It looked like a Scorsese movie but with a goofier sense of humour. I was in. I even liked the way the credit came up at the end: A Quentin Tarantino Film. Who? Yeah, you're getting it. This was someone who knew he would be making a splash.
By no means the first post-modern feature film, Reservoir Dogs at least loaded its decade with style that stole rather than borrowed, amped up the radio oldies for irony value and played fast and loose with the timeline. By the late '90s you couldn't throw a cricket ball down movie street without hitting five to ten clones of the manic, self-consuming movies that plugged into the Tarantino M.O. And if you went to film student screening nights that's almost all you'd see. It the '80s it was Eraserhead clones but in the '90s it was comedy violence and passionate dialogue about pop culture.
You get all of that in the first twenty minutes of Reservoir Dogs when the gang argues about tipping and there's a diversion about the meaning of Madonna's Like a Virgin, before we get a getaway scene with a bloodied gangster in the back of a car. I'm in my cinema seat with a group of cronies and a near full house thinking, this is it, everything I want in a crime movie pressed into every scene, and then some.
And then it winds down. It winds down even when the violence on screen gets into straight razors and ear lobes and white hot tempers that threaten to explode into yet more violence. There are well constructed flashbacks to the planning stages and the revelation of who the rat in the ranks is and it plays to exact specifications. Don't get ne wrong, it was never anything less than entertaining, it's just that, as it went on it started feeling circular, as though this zippy new cine auteur was really only putting the good bits in: it started feeling like a feature length trailer.
I wondered if this sense of deflation came from the film's deliberate exclusion of any scenes of the heist itself. The events of it are reported by characters which gives rise to a lot of that punchy dialogue. But all we really get is a loop of find-the-rat and sudden violence. At the time I mused that Scorsese would have added a point to it. Reservoir Dogs doesn't have one. As Tarantino fronted up in interviews telling everyone that he used to work in a video shop and that the movie really was just meant to be guys in suits doing cool things, it made me wonder if this statement was less like punk (as more than one commentator had it) than techno which dressed a mollied up heartbeat with a few fun samples, packing only the essentials in.
Maybe that's what we needed, though, at that time; a cinema culture that only had to look like it was busy, so we could get our tickets' worth in a hurry and get on with whatever else nagged at our disposable time and money. My 30th anniversary (it came out in Australia in 1993) rewatch tested this. I saw it on the stunning 4K release from Lionsgate and the AV quality alone had me gaping. But this time I relaxed and let it happen. It still left me wanting but memories of the decade in its wake that sought to reproduce it (and at the indy level, not always as a big studio cash grab, importantly). While you did get a Guy Ritchie whose cover versions are so difficult to tell apart that you'll remember scenes from one that are from another, but we also got fun fests like Go or Human Traffic which were appropriately one and done like the best pop songs.
Tarantino, himself, moved on quickly with the more expansive Pulp Fiction (where he continued to revive faded careers as well as kickstart new ones with his casting), the superb and side steering JAckie Brown and so on until whatever he releases is lifted by his name more than an expected style. Tarantino became not just a brand but a gauge.
I also recall that the Tarantino decade ended with one of the great years of popular cinema with the likes of Fight Club and Being John Malkovich which sidestepped the QT primer and made way for the 2000s. And I recall most poignantly, that one of the most successful films of that year was as famous for its pioneering viral marketing as it was for its content. The Blair Witch Project cleared the table of the mainstream genre films that left the '90s bland by going back to dirt and basics, immediately distinguishing itself from its surrounds. Reservoir Dogs had done that in its year and both cases engendered misguided copying that missed the point by replaying the moves alone. But the reason I like Blair Witch more than Reservoir Dogs is that it feels like it just wants to make a living whereas Reservoir Dogs wants to make a brand name. It's great fun if all you want is great fun.
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