Film Review — Jackie Brown
★★★★☆
Forced to choose between the cops and her arms dealer boss, a cunning flight attendant decides to go into business for herself.
Perennially overlooked in favour of his flashier (and bloodier) films, Quentin Tarantino’s homage to seventies blaxploitation and heist movies deserves far more love than it currently gets.
Indeed Jackie Brown, the only adapted screenplay of Tarantino’s distinguished career, is a very different proposition when compared to his previous films. Unlike Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, the action is far more restrained, and the pace at times is almost glacial — Tarantino himself often refers to this as his “hangout movie”.
But this different, dialled-back approach doesn’t lessen the enjoyment. Quite the opposite, actually. This time the mastery is much less visible, coming in the form of Tarantino’s superb adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s original novel, Rum Punch. The screenplay maintains Leonard’s framework and spiky wit, but Tarantino’s idiosyncrasies are unmistakably present, so much so that this deserves to be considered a work just as legitimate as his own original concoctions.
With the exception of his recent, Once Upon A Time…in Hollywood, this is arguably Tarantino at his most romantic. The pairing of veterans Pam Grier and the late Robert Forster was an inspired one, the two breathing life and soul into their performances, the kind that acting school alone could never teach. The film is at its best when the two are together on-screen.
The rest of the cast is typically impeccable. Samuel L. Jackson turns in the most sinister performance of his career, while Robert De Niro is hilariously unrecognisable, barely removed from his turn as an ice-cool criminal in Michael Mann’s iconic Heat. Here he’s anything but.
I, too, consider Jackie Brown to be a great “hangout movie”. It’s a sordid treat, filled with colourful characters spouting endlessly quotable dialogue; its soundtrack might be the best of Tarantino’s entire filmography, and when the words simply escape me, it’s just…cool.
This is top-tier Tarantino. A criminally underrated movie.
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