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Created Mar 23, 2013 01:50AM PST • Edited Apr 28, 2022 08:27AM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Really Great 4.5

   Lesser Tarantino but accomplished Tarantino still, Jackie Brown sports a full house of his filmic qualities. Half a dozen stars unspool a cockamamie but coherent story over 2½ hours, complete with bad guys taking each other out, sudden ends and funny surprises. Then there’s the down and dirty attitude.

   Quentin’s pervasively nihilistic third movie has more street cred than an Escalade full of hip-hop moguls.

   Does that leave anything out? Oh yeah, Samuel L. Jackson as first amongst equals in a cast that includes a Fonda, a Keaton, the one and only De Niro, and the legendary Pam Grier. Check ‘em out. Now that’s a cast!

   They each join Quentin for the first time, aside from Tarantino regular Jackson, who plays a stone cold bad-ass, of course. He’s an automatic weapon prone to rapid firing of the N-word. Spike Lee was not amused.

   The movie’s all about conventions, embracing and satirizing them. IOW, it’s classic Tarantino.

   Jackie Brown falls in the pulpy wing of the Tarantino canon with Pulp Fiction, natch. The lack of a real-world calamity as backdrop leaves it a notch below Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained. Truth.

4. Acting

   Really Great 4.5

   Massive cast

   When a prime Michael Keaton performance doesn’t start till half an hour in, that’s spreading the minutes.

   The Big Six

   • Pam Grier is Jackie Brown! Once Foxy Brown, Queen of Blaxploitation, her late career high came in this Elmore Leonard story directed by a big blaxploitation fan. Almost 50, she’s still foxy.
   • Robert Forster as the bailbondsman who falls for her. Forster also got a late career boost here, going on to become one of the busiest actors of the 21st century in both TV and the movies, including appearing as George Clooney’s macho father-in-law in The Descendants and the brass-laden Army General in Olympus Has Fallen.
   • Samuel L. Jackson in a stunningly powerful and utterly cold performance as a gun running tycoon. How cold? His character should’ve been named Max Chill instead of Ordell Robbie.
   • Bridget Fonda as his blond surfergirl, prancing about in cutoffs and fluorescent bikini top. Cute!
   • Robert De Niro as a recently paroled bank robber who can’t handle her. De Niro disappoints for the first couple of reels, truth be told. But he’s our old Bobby by the end.
   • Michael Keaton as a very cool Federal Marshall bound to take ’em all down.

5. Male Stars Perfect 5.0

6. Female Stars Perfect 5.0

7. Female Costars Great 4.0

8. Male Costars Great 4.0

10. Film

    Really Great 4.5

    Quentin Tarantino’s third film proved that Pulp Fiction was no fluke. Jackie Brown was just as ambitious, accomplished and audacious as his iconic sophomore effort. Fully indulging his now favored habit of overt homage, he reached back to the pinnacle of blaxploitation for his lead character, placing her in the setting of an Elmore Leonard crime novel transplanted from Miami to L.A. On yeah, he also made her black.

    Foxy Brown became Jackie Brown, just shy of a ¼-century since Foxy ruled movie houses from Compton to Harlem. Thus Tarantino elevated his youthful B-movie inspiration into accomplished A-movie greatness.

11. Direction Perfect 5.0

12. Play Really Great 4.5

13. Music Perfect 5.0

    No score, just songs. And what songs, Across 110th Street by Bobby Womack and Peace, Strawberry Letter 23 by The Brothers Johnson, Tennessee Stud by Johnny Cash to name three.

    Who Is He (And What Is He to You?) by Bill Withers to name one more. Soul. Serious Soul.

14. Visuals Great 4.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Sordid 3.1

    Ascending Sex, Violence and Rudeness scores are typical Tarantino. Nasty, Brutal and Titillating in descending order averages out to lots of low-down dirty fun.

17. Sex Titillating 1.6

18. Violence Brutal 3.5

19. Rudeness Nasty 4.2

21. Reality

    Glib 1.7

22. Circumstantial Surreal 2.3

23. Biological Glib 1.7

24. Physical Natural 1.0