Reservoir Dogs

Reservoir Dogs is Quentin Tarantino's unpleasant breakthrough film, about a gangster boss, Joe Cabot, who has hired five men to carry out a diamond heist for him. The men must not know each other's identities. So they are given code names after colours. The heist goes wrong, as the police were lying in wait after a tip-off. The informer must be one of them, which wears down their already frayed nerves. Reservoir Dogs goes all the way, for not one of the central characters survives. The tragicomic thing is that they themselves, rather than the police, are responsible for most of the killings. The film is downright repulsive, but also disgustingly inventive in contrasting harsh scenes of violence and torture after the failed heist with flashbacks of the peaceful preparation of the heist, where the driving force is the dialogue.

Tarantino is a lover of bizarre dialogue in excessive quantities, which makes his films resemble exercises in style. The film's clever structure has no doubt helped to dupe quite a few critics, but the non-chronological arrangement of the scenes does also have certain memorable effects in the transitions from one scene to another.