Quentin Tarantino’s career as a filmmaker started strong with the crime movie Reservoir Dogs, released in 1992 and now regarded as a classic of independent cinema and a cult film, and its influence has been such that it has already been remade. Reservoir Dogs introduced the world to Quentin Tarantino’s narrative and visual style, which includes high doses of blood and violence, and while it has its controversial moments and behind-the-scenes stories, it continues to be praised by critics and viewers, and it has earned a spot in film history.
Reservoir Dogs follows a group of thieves assembled and led by crime boss Joe Cabot (Lawrence Tierney) and his son Eddie “Nice Guy” Cabot (Chris Penn) who look to steal thousands of dollars from a jewelry store. Although it was all carefully planned, the heist didn’t go as expected, and the members of the team ended up showing their true colors in the aftermath of it – and to make it all worse, there was an undercover cop among them. Like most of Tarantino’s movies, Reservoir Dogs doesn’t have a sequel or spinoff, and while it might seem too soon for it to be remade, it has already been, but it isn’t a widely known remake.
Reservoir Dogs Was Remade As A Bollywood Movie
Due to its impact and legacy, Reservoir Dogs has inspired many works, but only one is a remake of it, though with elements from other movies: Kaante, a Bollywood movie released in 2002. Directed by Sanjay Gupta, Kaante is set in Los Angeles, California, where a group of six men of Indian origin, all of them with a criminal record, are detained by the police and interrogated about stealing a truck full of laptops and its whereabouts. Driven by their deep antipathy towards the police for arresting them without evidence, the group comes up with a plan to rob a bank in which lies the funding for the LAPD. Kaante was a box office success, and it has received praise from critics as well.
Although Kaante takes a lot from Reservoir Dogs, it also has elements from other movies, particularly the Chinese crime thriller City on Fire, which follows an undercover cop investigating a group of jewelry thieves, as well as from Michael Mann’s Heat and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing. Tarantino has shared that Kaante is his favorite among the films that have been inspired by his work, and in 2017, it was screened at Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema, alongside Reservoir Dogs and City on Fire.
The Movies That Influenced Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs
It’s not surprising that Kaante was also influenced by City on Fire and The Killing as these also were some of Tarantino’s inspirations for Reservoir Dogs. Tarantino has said that Reservoir Dogs is his Killing, as in his “take on that kind of heist movie”, and the plot was inspired by the 1952 movie Kansas City Confidential, which follows four criminals who join forces to carry out a bank heist. Tarantino also took some elements from The Big Combo, where police Lt. Leonard Diamond goes on a journey to expose a powerful gangster called Mr. Brown, and Sergio Corbucci’s Django, specifically the torture scene with Mr. Blonde. The characters being named after colors were taken from the 1974 movie The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and the final minutes of the movie are very similar to those of City on Fire.