The movie shootout that shaped Quentin Tarantino’s career
There are many tropes, tricks, and techniques that have become synonymous with the work of Quentin Tarantino, but arguably the most important is the writer and director’s innate ability to craft a memorable ending to each one of his features.
It’s all well and good to become a subgenre unto himself with deep cut references and homages to his favourite movies, needle-drops galore on the soundtrack, rapid-fire dialogue littered with quotable quips and pop culture soundbites, or the regular lashings of bloodshed and wanton violence, but it’s always of the utmost importance for every production to stick the landing.
It doesn’t matter if a film is incredible for 99% of its running time because if it ends on a bum note, that’s all anybody is going to want to talk about afterwards. People tend to remember the most recent things burned into their memory, so a great flick with a shitty finale is inevitably going to suffer from failing to maintain its momentum until the credits come up.
Tarantino has never had to contend with such concerns, though, because he knows how to craft a final act. From the Mexican standoff in Reservoir Dogs to the blood-soaked brawl in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood via the burning cinema of Inglourious Basterds and the House of Blue Leaves showdown that rounds out the first half of Kill Bill, the filmmaker always makes his last reel count.
However, for someone who hasn’t made a straightforward action movie in the traditional sense, it was a gun-toting classic that inspired Tarantino to ensure the viewers went home happy. He had no idea what was in store when he first sat down to see it, other than the fact he was hyped due to a combination of star and director he was already a huge fan of, but fortunately, he was sufficiently satiated.
“I remember when I watched John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow II, I was watching it with a buddy of mine, and it’s all building to this big climax,” he explained to Roger Ebert. “We hadn’t seen this movie before, so we didn’t know they were going to have the biggest shootout in the history of film. My friend turns to me and goes, ‘If they don’t get naked and boogie at the end of this movie, this has been for nothing.'”
Tarantino’s buddy may have been speaking in a figurative sense, but the point still stands. They’d been engrossed in the story up to the grand finale, but if it didn’t live up to everything that came before, then the conclusion would have been a washout. He admitted how it “doesn’t matter that we enjoyed everything leading up to the end,” A Better Tomorrow II “had to end in a big way or it was all for nothing”.
With that in mind, it makes perfect sense that Tarantino would go out of his way to have every single one of the features to date big farewell in suitably spectacular style, because otherwise the build-up wasn’t worth it.
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