Reservoir Dogs and City on Fire share a recognisable dramatic situation: an undercover police officer develops a bond with a criminal, and that bond is exposed when the gang suspects a betrayal. Ringo Lam’s film, released in 1987, predates Quentin Tarantino’s 1992 debut. The relationship between the two makes it possible to examine how the same kind of conflict changes when its presentation is rearranged.
The similarity goes beyond the presence of guns or a botched heist. It affects the tension between belonging to an institution and owing something to a person in the group under investigation. A protective gesture can contradict the position each character ought to occupy. That overlap makes the divisions between ally, enemy and informant unstable.
The discussion of their influences has become entangled with a controversy over cinematic borrowing. To understand it, it helps to consider two levels: the relationships between the characters and the way information is presented to the audience. Recognising a specific antecedent does not yet tell us how much of it a film uses, how it is prepared, or what consequences it produces.
The undercover agent and loyalty under suspicion
The most precise kinship lies in the conflict between a police mission and a personal relationship. The undercover agent needs to seem credible to the criminals, but the trust he wins does not remain a tool without consequences. When someone in the group treats him as a mate, the investigation acquires a cost that the character cannot simply resolve by reminding himself which side he is on.
The entry for City on Fire on Criterion Channel identifies Chow Yun-fat as Ko Chow, a police officer who goes undercover in a gang and forms a bond with the leader played by Danny Lee. After a robbery that ends in a shootout, the thieves suspect there is an informant. That combination of infiltration, closeness and distrust provides a concrete basis for comparing the films.
In Reservoir Dogs, the relationship between Mr Orange and Mr White allows us to view the problem from the perspective of the person who trusts. White helps a man he believes is a fellow criminal. His judgement is built on the way they behave with one another and on a shared situation; the audience, knowing Orange’s identity, has information that alters the meaning of that help. Protection can be sincere and still rest on a mistaken belief.
The value of the similarity lies in that contradiction. Loyalty does not guarantee that you know the other person, and discovering someone’s identity does not make everything experienced with them false. Comparing only who is carrying a gun misses this mechanism. The two stories set categories that seemed clear against one another: police officer and criminal describe positions, while friend and traitor depend on a relationship that events put to the test.
A similar ending within different structures
In his analysis for the BFI, updated in January 2022, Leigh Singer points to the undercover agent and the final armed showdown as links with Lam’s film. He also highlights a verifiable difference: City on Fire shows the robbery, whereas Reservoir Dogs leaves it out. Tarantino’s audience is given the consequences and versions of a central action it has not been able to witness.
That omission changes the function of the conversations. When the survivors explain what went wrong, there is no complete image of the robbery against which to weigh each statement. Attention falls on who is speaking, what they may have seen, and what interest they have in defending a version of events. An accusation can seem persuasive because of the confidence with which it is made, even when there is still not enough information to verify it.
The undercover agent’s journey also changes. City on Fire places the audience alongside Ko Chow and his police assignment; Reservoir Dogs withholds Orange’s identity until we have already seen White protect him. The revelation forces us to reconsider a relationship that began before our eyes. The effect depends on having first seen the dependence between the two men and then the difference between their real positions.
The armed confrontation concentrates those relationships into an immediate decision: believe an accusation, sustain trust, or accept that another man imposes his interpretation. The characters may share the same space while holding incompatible information. That arrangement explains why the visual kinship is so recognisable, but also why its weight changes depending on what each film has revealed beforehand.
Temporal rearrangement has other precedents. The relationship with The Killing, by Stanley Kubrick, helps place Tarantino’s story within a tradition of heist films told out of chronological order. Identifying that tradition helps sharpen the comparison with Lam: a shared conflict does not by itself explain all of Reservoir Dogs narrative choices.
Mike White’s edit and Tarantino’s response
Mike White turned the comparison into a critical intervention through Who Do You Think You're Fooling?. In “Jealous Much?”, published on his Impossible Funky Productions blog on 26 June 2015, White identifies the work as a 1994 piece he helped create to confront City on Fire with Reservoir Dogs. That is the correct title; it should not be confused with other documentaries about Tarantino.
His method brings together material from the two films in order to make the borrowing he questions more visible. It is worth attributing that argument to White: the edit organises a critical reading through the selection and juxtaposition of fragments. From there, the debate can address the significance of the parallels, how much the new narrative relationships transform them, and what recognition the earlier work receives.
Tarantino responded directly to the influence at the 25th anniversary event held at Sundance in 2017. Chris Bumbray reported his words for JoBlo: he acknowledged that City on Fire had inspired him, rejected describing his film as a remake that merely paraphrased it, and explained that he had developed a feature film from the situation in its final ten minutes.
That recollection shows how the director defends the transformation of the material; it does not replace the examination of the films themselves. White’s objection emphasises the recognisable correspondences, while Tarantino places the emphasis on the expansion of a situation. They are two different ways of judging the borrowing. The discussion of cinematic pastiche begins here with identifiable decisions: which conflict is retained, which information is delayed, and which relationship comes to organise the viewer’s experience.
When comparing fragments, the boundaries of each extract affect what appears to match. Two close shots may highlight a posture or the placement of weapons; a longer sequence allows us to observe how that posture is reached and how long it lasts. To assess the kinship, it helps to keep in mind the question that organises each scene: what a character is trying to find out, what the audience already believes, and what action might change the situation.
The soundtrack deserves the same attention. Changing the dialogue that accompanies an image can suggest an equivalence that the original edit did not formulate in that way. The device can be useful as a comparative argument, provided the construction of the essay is distinguished from the construction of the film. The similarity of a gesture, the function of a scene and the overall organisation of a story are different scales of analysis. Keeping them separate makes it possible to discuss concrete examples without demanding that one coincidence explain the whole feature film on its own.