"Reservoir Dogs" is one of those movies that was pretty good when I first saw it but not so good once I knew what was going to happen. Granted there are still elements I continue to like, but as a whole it is ehhh… OK upon multiple viewings.

The story is about a heist gone bad. The foiled criminals make their ways back to the hideout to figure out what happened and what to do next. Some suspect a rat in their ranks while others think their troubles have been caused by the psychopathic killer that turned the robbery into a bloodbath. As one man bleeds to death on the floor of the hideout the others try to gather enough information to plan their next move.

One unusual bit about the story is that we never see the heist. We see the planning, and we see the aftermath, but we don’t know what went on outside of the descriptions given in conversation. It's very much a dialogue-driven movie.

An odd element of the directing, and one of the elements I still like the most, is the sequence of the scenes. Tarantino (the director) describes it as a novel which I think is accurate. A novel will often tell events out of chronological order. It’s not a flashback as in someone remembering, it’s transporting the reader to another moment in time just as if this scene were in its proper place in the book as far as sequence of events goes. "Reservoir Dogs" does this a lot (similar in fashion to "Pulp Fiction" though with a tighter continuity).

We start with a kind of overture to the group, very shallow glimpses of their characters and relationships. Then we focus on the core characters and their primary problems. It’s enough to make the viewer wonder who these people are and how they arrived at this moment in time. Once that curiosity is established the movie jumps back to moments in time that are pertinent and will weigh on events to come.

It’s like putting together a puzzle. We start with the boarders. We know the general position of some of the images but not much of the whole picture. Then we start adding faces, one here one there, and filling in the area around them so that we have a better understanding of the context. But whereas most movies would lay down the top row of puzzle pieces then the second row and so forth until the end, "Reservoir Dogs" adds a face here, a context there, another face, a bit more to that first context, and like that. It’s an unusual progression for a movie, but it works nicely.

Tarantino likes to use violent humor. I'm referring mostly to the cop torture scene. Mr. Blonde does a funny little dance and cracks some bad jokes as he mutilates a cop. I never realized this was actually supposed to be funny until I watched the commentary (I saw it as more of Mr. Blonde THINKING he was being funny). Tarantino talks about how he tries to control the emotion of the viewer with the dance and jokes juxtaposed against the violence, and evidently he got some laughs out of the audience as they watched it with him. Nothing in it strikes me as funny, though. Instead, I think it's rather chilling. It works for the scene, I'm not saying it doesn't belong, I'm just saying that if part of the appeal is supposed to be the humor, that humor is lost on me (though I'm very much a fan of dark humor) and therefore not part of the appeal in the way it was intended.

The pacing of the dialogue is very different from most movies. Different is not always good, but in this case it works. Besides the content of some of that dialogue my only complaint is that it can sometimes drag. It typically has a more natural flow to it compared to the average movie, bordering on being jumbled but without the speakers ever actually stepping on each other.

The music is also unusual although not to the extent of some of the other elements I've mentioned. There is no instrumental score. The soundtrack is comprised of old pop-rock songs interspersed with radio announcements by Stephen Wright the comedian. Most of the music selections are pretty good although I HATE the Nilsson song about the lime and the coconut at the end (made all the worse because of how popular that stupid song is). I dislike it even more here because the tone it sets doesn't feel right to me.

During the cop torture scene the radio plays "Stuck in the Middle with You." When inside the warehouse the music fills the air like a score, but when Mr. Blonde goes outside the music fades out then back in as the camera moves back inside. It's a touch I greatly enjoy in the sound design. This is a song that doesn't fit the mood in a typical way, either, but I think it works here unlike the Nilsson song.

So really what it comes down to is that this movie tries some new things with pacing and design. I highly appreciate the composition in that regard. However, some people treat it as the best thing ever because of a few high points, and I just really don't think it's as incredible as people make it out to be.