Reservoir Dogs introduced viewers to a group of thieves with an undercover cop among them, which triggered a major conflict. Towards the end, there was a Mexican standoff between three of the remaining characters, but one of them, Nice Guy Eddie, died before he was even shot – here’s what happened. Quentin Tarantino’s film career as the world now knows it began in 1992 with the crime film Reservoir Dogs, which prepared the world for what Tarantino had to offer to the film industry.
Reservoir Dogs followed a group of six criminals – all of them with different code names – whose planned heist of a jewelry store went terribly wrong. In addition to that, there was an undercover cop between them, which made the tension between all of them even bigger. The group was led by crime boss Joe Cabot (Lawrence Tierney) and his son “Nice Guy” Eddie Cabot (Chris Penn), who weren’t directly involved in the heist but were very much involved in the mess that came after it. In an attempt to figure out who was the cop, there was a lot of betrayal between all the men involved, who ended up falling one by one. At the peak of the conflict and tension between the surviving ones, there was a Mexican standoff between Mr. White (Harvey Keitel), Joe Cabot, and Nice Guy Eddie, and there’s a mistake in that scene that left a big question.
After learning that Mr. Blue (Edward Bunker) was killed, Joe arrived at the warehouse, ready to kill Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) as he suspected he was the traitor who set them up. Orange spent the whole movie on the verge of death as he was wounded and bleeding heavily, but he still had the strength to insist that he was innocent (though he definitely wasn’t). Mr. White intervened and tried to reason with Joe, but he ended up holding him at gunpoint while Joe pointed at Mr. Orange. Eddie quickly aimed at Mr. White, demanding that he dropped the gun or he would kill him if he hurt his father. The three eventually fired, with the Cabots dying and Mr. White and Mr. Orange being injured – however, when looking closely at the scene, Eddie died before Mr. White fired at him.
Chris Penn once explained that his blood squib (a mini explosive device used in films to simulate gunfire) went off earlier than planned, forcing him to fall to the floor before time. Penn said that Keitel was supposed to shoot Tierney and then him, but the squib on Keitel went right off after shooting Tierney, so he went down before he shot Penn, whose squib went off anyway, so he had to fall too. It was bad timing, but Tarantino decided to keep the scene for the sake of people talking about the film, saying it would be “the biggest controversy of the film”. In the end, nobody shot Nice Guy Eddie, but in the script, it was Mr. White who did it, which completely rules out the option of Mr. Orange shooting Eddie.
Even if no one shot him due to a mistake with the blood squibs, Nice Guy Eddie didn’t survive the shooting, and in the end, the last man standing was Mr. White, who in his final moments shot Mr. Orange before being killed by the police (Mr. Pink’s fate, however, is open to debate). This is one of those mistakes that ended up helping the film, as it definitely gave the audience something to talk about and analyze for a while.