Trashy caper nonsense - but saved by grade A acting performances.

Rating: 7/10 (13 May 2003)

A stewardess (Jackie Brown played by Pam Greer) gets in to legal trouble when bringing contraband back to the US and has to tread a difficult path between the police and the dangerous criminal that is using her.
Certainly easy to see why Tarantino would be interested in this piece of airport trash (lots of mini-characters, cross agendas and ping-pong dialogue), but harder to see why he should chose to make the thing so long and laborious.
(Maybe it is a case of "never mind the quality, feel the width?")
Fancy having Robert "I've never paid for it" De Niro (maybe working at his "fashion director" discount price?) and give him a throw away role - as a slow speaking criminal moron that anyone in the Actors A-Z could play! He is not even funny-stupid, just stupid-stupid!
Greer is not stretched here anymore than she was in her Blacksploitation heyday. She is in a hole and has to think her way out. There is no one else in her life, she is not totally honest (ambiguity should never be knocked in movies!) and anything she does is only really about serving herself. Good performance - but there is nothing to really go wrong.
Tarantino is actually quite a green film maker (he prefers giving "my life as a hot new director" interviews and watching B movie junk to learning his trade on a set). Maybe he knows the limits of his own talents - only time will tell. Certainly his criminals are remarkably samey - idiots, thugs and street comedians with guns.
If you want to portray a caper in great detail (and cover the same ground more than once ala Kubricks early work) then you have to make sure that every little thing works and is correct. As the goofs index shows, there are clear errors that you can spot in one sitting and that doesn't even include things that make no sense at all.
Here we have a rehearsal of a criminal act that the police are privy too. Why a rehearsal? It is a trap, the criminal has fallen in to it, arrest him. Why ask him to go again? What are they learning from the first time, he can't lead them anywhere? He might change his plans and bring his money in some other way next time!
Equally a child could come up with a way of transferring money easier than here - why the elaborate pantomime, what about simply going to the ladies toilet and passing bags under the door?
Without getting involved in spoilers - the way the thing is resolved is barely TV movie standard. After a sloth like crawl through the rest of the film - the thing wraps at double speed, with a stock device out of TV drama writers' handbook. I doubt any movie of the last ten years has had so much acting talent, budget and attention and yet come up with such an average product.