Most Rewatchable Scene
The Benihana scene
In the discussion (20)
Approx. transcript time · 00:22:57Read transcript
- The movie is centered on about five rewatchable scenes that bleed into each other, and the last hour and fifteen minutes is one action piece divided into three; one first pick is everything from the Hofbrau introduction through Nick and the LASD clique bracing Donnie in the hotel room.
- The case for the opening donut-shop robbery is the eeriness of LA at three or four in the morning once you leave Hollywood for Hawthorne and the side towns off the 10 and the 5, when the traffic is gone and the streets are empty, even if wetting down the streets is a liberty.
- The guy in the back of the armored truck has the worst job and always gets blown up; the crew goes straight for the cops and kills the first two in two seconds, which sets a tone unlike Heat, where the crew only fires back at cops as a last resort.
- The scene extends to the garage afterward, where the zoom on Pablo staring into the empty truck and the cop-killers line lay the stakes bare: thirty million richer or dead; Butler's entrance eating the donut, the hot-zone exchange and the pain-in-the-ass FBI agent giving him grief, plus the palm-juice piss-test detail, are also loved.
- Whether the drill-the-hole, insert-and-open trick on the truck window is a nod to the umbrella trick in the fifties French heist film Rafifi (as transcribed), alongside the obvious Heat hat tips, is raised as a question.
- The Hofbrau and the hotel room are where the movie jumps a level: Donnie's plea that he is only a driver, the tasing, the weird hotel with indoor smoking, ladies of the night and chicken tenders, and Nick pointing at his regulators to explain that the clique owns him; catching Donnie this early rather than midway is a different play.
- Donnie's story of meeting Merriman at the backyard barbecue, Merriman eating skirt steak with nothing else, the Dasani everywhere, the silver dollar pancakes pause, and the genre's tradition of people eating unhappily outdoors are enjoyed; Nick's ex-wife's dinner party is the only happy meal in the film.
- 50 Cent's prom-date scene, tucking in the blood handkerchief and leading the kid into the garage to meet the entire Long Beach Poly offensive line plus Pablo Schreiber and the Samoan guys, is played perfectly.
- The Benihana scene is one host's favorite scene in the movie; the idea is the Heat move of letting the other crew know you are on to them and applying pressure, and the guess is that ten straight takes were shot before Butler asked to do one completely insane take, which is the one they used.
- Benihana nitpicks are part of its rewatch appeal: Nick blows Donnie's cover immediately, and in real life a crew that killed four cops would have the city locked down rather than being followed to dinner, though the cops have no evidence and want to kill rather than arrest them.
- Whether this is the best Benihana scene of all time is asked; Benihana is an underused location with the shared table and the knives, and the dream version has Big Nick and Merriman squeezed in beside a family of civilians.
- How Merriman's crew set up an entire murder tent in the garage with plastic and a vat of acid between leaving Benihana and getting back is a lingering question, answered with the joke that a four-letter text to Jeff Chow at the Ringer gets the same thing set up in the spare office.
- Merriman standing up at the table with the family-here, popping-off line, shot so he looks eighteen feet tall with his chin out and chest tattoos, is a comic-book trick; the revelation that he is Liev Schreiber's half-brother leads to the joke of drafting him too.
- The men's suit store meeting is called possibly the greatest scene in American cinema history: cops who are regulars in a lounge at a shop selling leather jackets, cowboy boots and remaindered suits, Butler buying an out-of-style half-duster leather jacket and drinking coffee from porcelain, and Donnie openly meeting them in public, compared to the Hamburger Hamlet emergency meeting in Entourage.
- The personal-life interlude that follows the suit store is too much, the same problem as Heat, although Heat's relationships are detailed enough not to feel like a waste while the ex-wife here has no personality; Natalie Portman could be cut from Heat, a debate saved for the hundredth episode.
- The locked-and-loaded scene is a high-level version of the action-movie staple, with Gus's visualization techniques and Pablo Schreiber's rifle lesson to Donnie played as a clip; the crew carries thousands of bullets and still runs out.
- The three final robberies are the Pico Savings and Loan fake hostage situation, which one host found a mail-in that needed a more frightened bank manager, the long and elaborate Federal Reserve heist, and the highway shootout; the Chinese food sitting in the ceiling for a week is flagged as a nitpick.
- The Kaiser Soze reveal at the end does not need rewatching once you have it, though O'Shea Jackson's English accent is loved; the guess is that the original script was Merriman versus Nick and the Donnie plot was expanded so the last two scenes set up a sequel.
- Two go with Benihana as the one to stop channel-flipping for; the third has two answers, the shooting range standoff on a first viewing and, after five or six viewings, the hotel room interview where Donnie's little traps and the director's traps for the audience become visible, which also shows O'Shea Jackson is a gifted actor and a movie star.
- Earlier the Benihana scene is called incredible despite making no sense, and any scene set in Ziggy's Hofbrau would do.