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Okay, lessee � Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) is smuggling a half mil from Mexico into the U.S. for her bud Samuel L. Jackson � except that ATF agents (among them, Michael Keaton) had earlier busted Brown for some frame-up coke possession charge, and have their hooks in her to rat Jackson during the drop � meanwhile, Jackson's dim-witted accomplice Robert DeNiro (wuddever happened to this guy's career?!?) loses most of Jackson's money during the drop, and kills Jackson's blonde-bimbo surfer squeeze (Bridget Fonda) in a shopping mall parking lot � at the same time Brown's slick bail bondsman is scooping up 9/10ths of the green in an alternative choreography.
I got a headache.
The whole movie looks like director Quentin Tarentino graduated from UCLA film school sometime yesterday: a close-up of pouring coffee when Grier's getting coffee, a close-up of a phonograph needle when Grier's playing a record, and a 90-minute series of static, lifeless camera shots. The sound is muffled, the editing is clumsy, seemingly shot on a budget tighter than Rosie O'Donnell's girdle. To say it's a student film would be an insult to student films
And protagonist Grier can't act worth shit � though, curiously, she projects a weird, sexy, tough vulnerability onscreen.
But because the plot is so ridiculously obtuse, ya gotta keep watching to see what these fuck-up characters manage to pull off next. It's SOO ridiculous, at some point it becomes modestly entertaining. And I'm always gratified when an over-40 actress is cast by an industry devoted to pouty pubescent poon.
Jackie Brown exists primarily for director Tarentino to unleash his junior-high fantasies of gritty black streetlife and prove he's not a nerdy white boy. Quentin, m'man, methinks ya'll be tryin' tooooo damn hard �