Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs struck a chord with critics and moviegoers because it looked at the heist picture from another angle. The movie told its story with a chopped up narrative and left the actual crime up to the imagination. Reservoir Dogs, a new game based on the 14-year-old movie, completely misses the point of the influential indie flick. This comes as no surprise in the world of video games, a place where the sniper rifle is considered the height of subtlety. So where the source material dealt in character-building dialog and clever construction to create a story filled with mystery, humor and horror this adaptation concentrates on the only parts of movies that crime games seem capable of recreating, gun fights and car chases.

A Bullet in the Head

The action in Reservoir Dogs plays like the climactic gun fight in Heat. You step into the role of one of the crooks trying to escape from the scene of a botched jewelry store job. Armed with dual 45s, or the occasional assault rifle plucked from the cold, dead hands a boy in blue, you must slowly work your way through a maze of road blocks and find your getaway car. The game's one saving grace is that it gives you an alternative to being a cop killer. Players can take hostages and force the law to disarm themselves. The rewards for this gallant behavior are slim. Sure, the game calls you a “professional” for making an escape with minimal bloodshed. But no amount of praise can give you back the extra time you spent tediously hobbling through a shopping mall with a whiny janitor in a headlock.

The game's driving sequences are a huge departure in tone from the original film. Your car blasts  through traffic and over ramps like the General Lee. These Driver-style getaway sequences weave through city streets modeled after the outskirts of Los Angeles. But if it weren't for K-BILLY's Super Sounds of the '70s on the radio, you'd think you made a wrong turn and wound up in San Andreas.

Screenwriting for Dummies

Perhaps the biggest disappointment is the way Reservoir Dogs mangles the movie's complex story. Michael Madsen reprises his role as Mr. Blonde and does a decent job reciting his lines. The rest of the cast is voiced by sound-alikes, the worst of whom does a Tarantino impersonation that makes the actor/director sound like Rain Man. The cut scenes dwell only in high-drama moments, leaving all the pop-culture laden coffee shop monologues on the cutting room floor. There are moments when the game tries to put new lines into the characters' mouths, but it's clear that their writers just aren't up to the task. You can't expect these guys to nail QT's rapid fire dialog when they're hard-pressed to grasp rudimentary storytelling. At its core Tarantino's movie is about an impossible friendship between an undercover cop and a lifelong crook. Reservoir Dogs skips over this rich material like a Ritalin kid punching in a Grand Theft Auto cheat code and zeros in on the logistics of the robbery. Leave it to video games to take a movie as cool as Reservoir Dogs and boil it down to bullets, burnt rubber and blood.

Article by: Gus Mastrapa
Video produced by: Michael Benson