"...and that my friend, was a clear cut case of him or me."

Rating: 7/10 (29 April 2007)

OK, so how did Jackie Brown get the half million dollars out of Mexico? She's an airline hostess, not a stewardess, and she's never shown making a flight. I also missed the part where someone writes a withdrawal slip for all that cash. But aside from that glaring plot hole, and if you don't think about it too much, you can have a pretty good time with "Jackie Brown". But don't expect the reckless abandon and frenetic fury of the two films that put Quentin Tarantino on the map, you know the ones I'm talking about. What you have here is a more controlled pace and a linear approach that's easier to follow than Tarantino's signature moves. That gives the viewer a little more time to anticipate what might come next, but even then you're caught off guard by certain scenes. You might have expected Beaumont (Chris Tucker) to get whacked, but having Louis (Robert De Niro) waste Melanie (Bridget Fonda) was a left field stunner. Which brings me back to the suspension of disbelief necessary to pull this one off. You have a broad daylight shooting in the parking lot of the 'world's largest indoor mall' and not one other person is in the vicinity?
What I don't want to do is talk myself into not liking this film, which I see now might be easy enough to do. Instead I'll focus on the characters, with De Niro delivering a sublime performance as a small time hood to Samuel L. Jackson's bad a-- self confidence. Pam Grier's Jackie was in total control, with a range that gave the film a lot of it's energy. The surprise though might have been Robert Forster's character Max Cherry, flying so far under the radar as an actor that I can't believe he's garnered over a hundred film credits, and I can't picture him in even one. Round it out with Fonda and Michael Keaton and you've got a lot of talent keeping things just near the boiling point.
With the movie now hitting the ten year mark, it's interesting to see how director Tarantino goes back to the well for his latest effort in the two part "Grindhouse" feature. "Nothing gets between me and my A-K" could have been a trailer for that one, and who can miss the connection between Max Cherry and Cherry Darling?