The Reservoir Dogs Just Aren't That Cool

Reservoir Dogs was definitely a guy movie. It was full of blood, gore, violence, and nothing but testosterone-driven men wanting to commit the perfect crime. Personally, I have a strong distaste for movies such as that, so I rarely watch them. This was also my first encounter with Quentin Tarantino’s work. I was intrigued by the fractured timeline he used, and I enjoyed the pop culture references and 70s playlist, but his overall obsession with gore was too much for me to handle.

Much like RoboCop, this movie almost made me sick with its senseless massacres. When Mr. Blonde went crazy and cut the policeman’s ear off I almost had to leave the room. Violence with a visible reason doesn’t bother me, but harming someone or something for with no reason other than sick, twisted personal joy is repulsive. That scene with the cop made me think back to when Murphy was gunned down by the drug dealers in RoboCop. The killing was overly brutal and nasty, and neither Mr. Blonde nor those drug dealers had a valid motive for doing what they did. If a character has to die, just get it over with in one quick shot, don’t drag it out and make us watch someone writhe in pain while their ear is cut off. There is nothing cool about that. Characters like Mr. Blonde are just not cool in any sense of the word in my opinion.

What was cool about this movie (other than the awesome 70s music) was the competency shown by a few of the other characters. Mr. Orange was probably my favorite character, not because he was a cop, but because he was so good at his undercover work that no one figured him out until the very end of the movie. Even then Mr. White was still fooled by his act, and Mr. White was one of the most skilled men on the job it seemed. Mr. Orange’s level of proficiency was up to par with the other undercover workers such as Vesper Lynd (She had James Bond falling for her ruse all throughout Casino Royale.) or Al Pacino as “Rooster” in Righteous Kill (Pacino was a serial killer in this movie, but he kept it a successful secret from all of his buddies at the NYPD.) Much like those undercover agents, it is the element of competency that makes people like Mr. Orange cool even if you don’t always agree with their motives. That is also what made Joe so cool even though he was a crooked man running heist operations all over the city. He was smooth, calm, and collected even though his livelihood was based on robberies run by groups of total strangers. So while I thought what these men were doing was repulsive, I must admit that some of them at least were pretty cool when it came to getting the job done.