Worst to Best: The Performances of Quentin Tarantino

What is a great Quentin Tarantino performance? After revisiting From Dusk till Dawn last week for The Next Picture Show podcast, on which we paired it with Ryan Coogler’s (much better) new movie Sinners, I thought about his work in front of the camera and decided it wasn’t the right question. As Roger Ebert puts it in his one-star review of Destiny Turns on the Radio, “Quentin Tarantino isn’t an actor. He’s a director, a good one.” Yet he can be a compelling presence, despite the obvious limitations on his range, which nonetheless didn’t stop him from trying Southwestern, Japanese, and Australian accents at various points in his career. So consider this Worst to Best a ranked list of his most entertaining (or not) performances, and a rationale for why his casting makes sense for his films and sometimes for other directors’, too. 

Unranked: Sid, Sleep with Me (1994); Pick-Up Guy, Desperado (1995)

In the mid-‘90s, riding high off the twin sensations of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, Tarantino was everywhere, resulting in sort of cultural saturation that he seemed to swear off soon after, when he settled into a deliberate pace more suited to a director intent on making only ten features before retirement. His cameo appearances in Sleep with Me and Desperado were an extension of his pop-culture monologue in Reservoir Dogs, along with a party-hopper’s knack for colorful storytelling. His turn in Sleep with Me, a middling high-concept indie comedy, finds him buttonholing Todd Field at a party and explaining why Top Gun is not some dim blockbuster, but the story of a man’s struggle with his own homosexuality. (It’s persuasive.) In Desperado, the first of a few collaborations with Robert Rodriguez, he moseys up for a beer and tells the bartender (Cheech Marin) a great joke about a guy who bets $300 he can piss into a small glass 10 feet away without spilling a drop. It either says something about Tarantino or these mediocre movies that he’s the first thing anyone remembers about them. 

9. Johnny Destiny, Destiny Turns on the Radio (1995)

Quote: “Well, Lucille, that’s all the roads you didn’t take. And that’s all the choices you didn’t make. And that’s all the numbers you didn’t bet on. That’s everything that could have happened had things been different.”

As if to christen his own cursed ship, Tarantino took a supporting role in one of the many dreadful indie crime comedies that flooded arthouses in the wake of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, popping up in this offbeat whatsit as a supernatural hipster whose surname is unfortunately symbolic. When an escaped convict (Dermot Mulroney) makes his way out to the desert, it’s Johnny Destiny, fate incarnate, who picks him up in a 1969 Plymouth Roadrunner and drives him to Las Vegas, where he reunites with his criminal partner (James Le Gros) for additional trouble. Destiny later levitates out of a motel swimming pool with lightning bolts sparking around him and seems to drive the action, like a hipster deus ex machina. It says something that an attitudinal, dialogue-driven pastiche like Destiny Turns on the Radio has not a single “memorable quote” on the IMDb. 

8. Chester Rush, Four Rooms (1995) 

Quote: “Do you know how long it takes the average American to count to 600? One minute less than it takes to count to 700.”

Still as drunk on Miramax money as his characters in this segment are on Cristal, Tarantino and company were able to patch together Four Rooms, a low-budget anthology project that gave four directors (Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez and Tarantino) the opportunity to do the worst work of their careers. As Chester Rush, a white-hot Hollywood filmmaker blowing off steam with his buddies (Bruce Willis, Paul Calderon and Jennifer Beals) on New Year’s Eve, Tarantino presides over his segment like Lars Von Trier in The Kingdom, a master of ceremonies who’s bringing the audience in on an outrageous event. Bringing an old Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode to life, Chester has agreed to wager his car over a bet that his friend (Calderon) can’t light his Zippo ten times in a row. The whole cacophonous affair ends in a glib, wet fart of a conclusion that brings Four Rooms to a fitting end. 

7. Piringo, Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) 

Quote: “This is sukiyaki, not a damn lollipop.” 

Though Tarantino had greatly dialed back his appearances in other people’s movies after his mid-‘90s peak, he made an exception for Takeshi Miike, a prolific genre enthusiast from across the Pacific who shared his reputation for terrorizing film festivals around the globe. Dressed to look approximately like Clint Eastwood in the “Man with No Name” movies and speaking with an accent that wavers between Southern-ish and Japanese-esque, Tarantino serves as part of a framing device for Miike’s peculiar mash-up of Yojimbo and the Spaghetti Westerns of two Sergios, Leone and Corbucci. Sitting in front of a painted backdrop of a mountain at magic hour, his Piringo opens the film by shooting a snake from a carrion’s mouth, pulling out a whole egg from its disemboweled insides, and later scrambling it up. When Piringo appears later in the film, he violently smacks around a woman for failing to draw the sweetness out of the cabbage in his sukiyaki. Tarantino looks out of place through all of it. He also looks as happy as a kid shipped off to movie fantasy camp.