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>> Special Feature "Quentin TARANTINO": Reservoir Dogs: Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4

The scenes in the warehouse work really well in terms of keeping the audience connected to the movie, not at least because they are shot in realtime, so “every minute for them is a minute for you” [3]of being stuck in the warehouse.
While the guys are waiting for Joe Cabbot (the mob boss played by Lawrence Tierney) to arrive things get a little out of hand: Mr. Blonde loses his mind and starts torturing a cop (the famous ear slice scene) he obtained at the jewelry store. He is only stopped from setting him on fire by the bleeding Mr. Orange who empties his gun into Blonde's body. It almost seems that tragedy hovers over the whole place with things going unexpectedly wrong and finally the heightened emotions peak in a powerful mexican stand-off scene, where three gangsters are pointing guns at each other threatening their lives. A second later everyone pulls his trigger and three men drop to the floor.

Mr. Pink is the only one who gets away with the diamonds in a bag, just seconds before the police moves in. In the last moments Mr. Orange confesses to Mr. White that he's the rat.

The director shifts throughout the whole movie between scenes of preparations for the heist and its bloody aftermath, but the key aspect of Tarantino's movie is that he never shows the robbery itself. Reservoir Dogs is so to speak a heist movie where the actual heist got lost in the tumultuous events.
This also derives from a time when Tarantino wasn't sure whether he would be able to raise more than about 30000$, so shooting the whole movie at one location would be more affordable to him.
Those sequences where he jumps back and forth in time to introduce us to his main characters contrast the tight and disturbing (and by the way very stage-play-like) atmosphere of the warehouse although they sometimes seem a bit too slow paced and one wishes to speed up the story, but never-the-less they give the audience some time to breathe and relax from the disturbing images.
All in all Tarantino really hit a nerve with Reservoir Dogs, since it became one of the most influential gangster movies of the nineties. Thanks to excellent dialogue and a pitch-black sense of humor, the film is balancing stark contrast of extreme violence and easy-going crooks very well. A perfect example for such dialogue is the name giving sequence

-> Watch the scene on Youtube (allow pop-up)

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>> Special Feature "Quentin TARANTINO": Reservoir Dogs: Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4