Jackie Boring

Rating: 4/10 (5 July 2010)

The primary reason to watch this is to see Pam Grier as an unapologetically normal looking middle aged woman who is still sexy. Also the soundtrack is very cool and worth seeking out.
Otherwise, Tarantino's cinematic fingerprints are very much in evidence, although used to very little effect. We get a foretaste of this at the start when Samuel L Jackson, as gun-runner Ordell Robbie, delivers a characteristically Tarantinoesque rambling monologue replete with obscenities and copious use of the N-word. Nothing we have not heard before with greater urgency in films like Pulp Fiction. This opening section, however, has good potential, in particular when Ordell bails a friend out of jail only to mysteriously kill him. The suspense is immediately dissipated in meandering scenes that go nowhere. We have to wait over an hour, an hour filled with more Tarantino long-winded speeches, before anything interesting happens again.
The plot is far too slender to withstand the weight and pretentiousness that Tarantino places upon it. When the switch comes, about 2 hours in, it is shot with the director's usual aplomb, from 3 different points of view. Fair enough (and this is the high point of the film aesthetically) but the actual plotting at this point is poor. We are to believe that a) the feds will allow their mark to into a changing room without keeping any sort of tabs on her. b) that the bondsman, who is known to the villains, will be in plain sight. This may be due to the source material which I've never read, but in the film it comes across as being contrived.
Yet more meandering sequences bring us to the finale which is very anti-climactic. And after that, a long ending sequence. I was watching it with a friend and he bailed out after 1 and a half hours. I felt like doing the same.