If you’re looking for a genuine psycho…look no further than Mr. Blonde. Quinten Tarantino knows how to orchestrate violence. He’s proven that again and again and has made it his trademark as a writer to mix violence with dark comedy. This film shows the early seeds of that genius.
A bunch of professional crooks are plotting a diamond heist. They’re all given code names like Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) and Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi) and Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) and Mr. Brown (Tarantino himself). But none of them compare to Mr. Blonde. Something goes wrong in the heist and Mr. Blonde starts blowing people away. The rest follow the plan and after escaping from the cops meet up at a warehouse rendezvous point.
Most of what we know about Mr. Blonde is secondary characterization. We get comments from others about how psycho he is and how what he did was shocking even to the other crooks he’s working with. But the audience is shown the true nature of this psycho when they kidnap a cop. Mr. Blonde proceeds to torture him by cutting off his ear and then pouring gasoline on him and threatening to burn him alive. The whole while he’s dancing and around the body duct taped to a chair. It’s a very disturbing and haunting image. It shows the lack of respect for human life…especially that of a cop. At one point Mr. Pink asks Mr. White if he shot anyone and Mr. White says, “A few cops.” To which Mr. Pink says, “No real people?”
The interesting thing is although Mr. Blonde is the one who supposedly killed so many people, we never actually see him kill anyone during the movie.
The term I’d like to link this film to is Expletive, which is an exclamatory oath. In this film the word fuck or some derivation appears 272 times. That’s quite a bit for a film that took only 35 days to film.
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