Back in 1992, Quentin Tarantino burst onto the independent cinema scene with Reservoir Dogs, his ultraviolent feature debut. As a heist movie that doesn’t actually show the heist, Reservoir Dogs emerged as a different kind of crime thriller – one that immediately gripped young moviegoers. It harked back to the earliest genre movies, placed in a heightened reality.
Influences on the film’s style range from Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave classics to John Woo’s high-octane action thrillers. There’s plenty of dark humor, and also a lot of rug-pulls and stylized violence. So, here are Reservoir Dogs’ funniest and most shocking moments.
Funniest: Mr. Pink protests automatic tipping
The opening diner scene in Reservoir Dogs was all that audiences needed to get a sense of Tarantino’s bold and unique style. Simply put, his movies humanize genre characters by putting them into mundane situations (e.g. eating breakfast in a diner) and having them converse about the same everyday topics we all converse about (e.g. Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and the social convention of tipping).
Mr. Pink complains about the idea that he automatically has to leave a tip when he’s eating in a restaurant. He’ll only tip a waitress if she went out of her way to be particularly nice or accommodating. He sounds like Larry David when he says: “This tipping automatically…it’s for the birds.”
Most shocking: After the opening titles, Mr. Orange has a gunshot wound
In the opening scene of Reservoir Dogs, we meet a bunch of guys who are about to go and rob a jewelry store. But we never actually get to see the robbery. After breakfast, the opening credits play, and when they’re over and we cut back into the movie from a black screen, Mr. Orange is lying across the backseat of a car, bleeding out from a gunshot wound.
Mr. White is driving, telling him he’s going to be okay. Tarantino has a knack for throwing the audience in at the deep end, rather than easing them in at the shallow end. His particular brand of film is more effective that way.
Funniest: Mr. Blonde dances to “Stuck in the Middle with You”
This is possibly the most iconic moment in the movie. Mr. Blonde still stands as one of Tarantino’s most sadistic characters, even after all these years. After the other guys leave the warehouse, he’s alone with the cop he took hostage at the jewelry store. The cop tells him he doesn’t have any information, and Mr. Blonde believes him, but he won’t let that stop him from torturing him.
He puts “K-Billy’s Super Sounds of the ‘70s” on the radio and Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You” comes on. As Marvin Nash waits to be tortured, Mr. Blonde nonchalantly dances around the room. For all intents and purposes, Michael Madsen is a pretty good dancer.
Most shocking: Mr. Blonde cuts off Marvin Nash’s ear
This is the moment that caused a lot of audience members to walk out of Reservoir Dogs back in 1992. Juxtaposed with the harmless glee of Mr. Blonde dancing to “Stuck in the Middle with You,” it’s even more disturbing that he then cuts off Marvin Nash’s ear.
Tarantino frames this moment perfectly. As Mr. Blonde goes after the cop’s ear with his razorblade, the camera pans away, as if it’s too gruesome to watch. But Mr. Blonde doesn’t let us avoid the gruesomeness for long, as he then invades the frame with Marvin’s severed, blood-soaked ear in his hand. This is peak Tarantino.
Funniest: Mr. White steals Joe’s address book
In the role of Joe Cabot in Reservoir Dogs, Lawrence Tierney brought a comedic bent to his usual tough-guy routine. Much like The Simpsons, Tarantino used Tierney’s history of playing menacing gangsters to toy with the audience’s expectations. When he says something funny, it’s even funnier, because Tierney doesn’t typically play funny roles.
In the opening scene, he’s fiddling with his address book and Mr. White takes it away from him. Joe tells him to give back the book and Mr. White says, “Are you gonna put it away?” In a hysterically deadpan way, Joe replies, “I’m gonna do whatever the f**k I want with it.”
Most shocking: Mr. Orange is shot during a carjacking gone wrong
Due to the nonlinear story structure, we knew that Mr. Orange was going to get shot at some point during this sequence. Near the beginning of the movie, after the plot skipped from the breakfast to the post-heist panic, we saw Mr. Orange with a gunshot wound in his stomach, bleeding all over the backseat of a car. It seemed like maybe the police had shot him, or maybe one of the other robbers.
But he actually got shot by an average citizen he was trying to carjack. She pulled out a little pistol and shot him, and he promptly blew her head off. The whole thing was so anticlimactic in the best way.
Funniest: “Lemme tell you what ‘Like A Virgin’ is about…”
Quentin Tarantino is notorious for putting himself in his movies, and this has been true since the very beginning. Literally. He gave himself a lengthy monologue to open Reservoir Dogs. He gets the first line, as he tells the other guys over breakfast what he believes to be the hidden meaning of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.”
According to Mr. Brown, “Like a Virgin” is a song about “a girl who digs a guy with a big d**k.” After the movie was released and became a cult classic, Madonna got in touch with Tarantino to tell him that he’d read “Like a Virgin” wrong.
Most shocking: Everybody opens fire during the Mexican standoff
The Mexican standoff is a commonly used dramatic tool throughout Tarantino’s filmography. There’s a few in Reservoir Dogs, but the most intense one comes at the very end of the film. Joe wants to kill Mr. Orange, so Mr. White pulls a gun on him. So, Joe’s son “Nice Guy” Eddie pulls a gun on Mr. White.
The standoff escalates quicker than Anchorman’s news team brawl, as they all yell at each other and threaten to pull the trigger. Then, all of a sudden, every single one of them opens fire. They all take at least a couple of bullets, and the ones that aren’t dead will be dead soon enough.
Funniest: Joe gives everyone their codenames
Thanks to Tarantino’s signature nonlinear style, we’ve heard the characters of Reservoir Dogs being referred to by their designated color-coded aliases for over an hour before we see Joe assign them colors. This adds an extra layer of context to the gag.
Almost everyone is unhappy with their color-coding. Mr. Brown feels that his name is too close to “Mr. S**t.” Mr. Pink would rather be Mr. White, which he thinks sounds cooler than Mr. Pink. But the whole time, we know that they end up with those names. Joe refuses to let anyone swap names or choose their own.
Most shocking: Mr. Orange kills Mr. Blonde
All throughout the first half of Reservoir Dogs, there’s one question on the audience’s mind: who’s the undercover cop? Tarantino could’ve had Mr. Orange boldly announce, “I’m the cop!” like a melodramatic cliffhanger on an episode of Dallas. But he expertly chose to avoid exposition, which can feel lazy, and reveal the twist through action instead.
As Mr. Blonde is torturing the cop he kidnapped, and he’s about to light him on fire, he’s suddenly riddled with bullets and the cop is saved (for now). It’s Mr. Orange. We don’t need any more information to realize he’s the undercover cop.
