Tarantino's most adult work

Rating: 8/10 (1 March 2005)

Jackie Brown is probably the most adult work of director Quentin Tarantino. Although the name and star Pam Grier hint for a blacksploitation-style movie, the movie never feels like any kind of exploitation. There are numerous references to movies like Foxy Brown and many songs in the background are ripped from their soundtracks, but the movie itself is actually quite calm. It has some violence but it's not very explicit ea. it's shown off-screen. This is not how Tarantino movies usually are. Another thing that freaks us Tarantino fans out is that in the movie characters talk mainly about stuff that's related to the plot, there's barely any mention of old TV-series or Kung-fu movies of the 70's. This is why the movie also feels less Tarantino than his other work. This may be due to this being an adaptation of Elmore Leonard's the Rum Punch and not an entirely new story from QT's warped mind.
All this does not make this movie a bad one. In fact it's surprising how little actually happens in the movie, it's mainly just talk until the last 40 minutes or so. Yet Tarantino clearly has a gift with words, you will always feel interested about what a character says. Speaking of characters, Tarantino has usually a marvelous cast, but this puts the likes of Pulp Fiction to shame. Pam Grier is great at the title role, Robert DeNiro gives us yet another immortal role and Samuel L. Jackson does a superb arms-dealer who thinks a little too much of himself. Yet the best performance comes from Robert Foster, who is really the heart of the movie as a bail-payer, who becomes interested in Jackie Brown's scheme to steal the money his boss wants to smuggle to America. The relationship between Foster's character and Jackie is touching, almost like Vince and Mia in Pulp Fiction, as it's an almost love-story which ends before it even starts.
The plot is actually like a Seinfeld episode without the jokes. All characters seem to have different interests at first, but later all the plot points tie in together. And this time Tarantino actually tells the story linear, not by some jumps in time back and forth. It's actually a working solution for this film. We Tarantino fans got a little worried there when he made such a straight movie, quit for six years, but we certainly were rewarded as his next one was the two-volume roaring rampage of revenge, his most exploitational movie yet.
**** (8/10)