Jackie Brown

Rip It Up, Issue 248, 1 April 1998, Page 34

Jackie Brown

Director: Quentin Tarantino

This film is an outrageous homage to the extraordinary Pam Grier, the Afro Avenging Angel of so many blaxpoitation flicks of the 70s. At 155 minutes, this sprawling heist saga is a good 40 minutes too long, but thanks to Grier, looking a cross between an ebony Mae West and an escapee from Russ Meyer's fold, is eminently watchable. The real virtue of Jackie Brown, taken as it is from the Elmore Leonard classic, Rum Punch, is a quiet, understated humour that would work better on a smaller canvas. Those weird, extreme

close-ups, such as Grier's painted talon pressing a switch, or the way in which Tarantino's I close-ups, seem always painted talon pressing a switch, or the way in which Tarantino's characters seem always to end up in vehicles i listening to some highly significant 70s soul i classics (at the end of the film, Grier motors off to a new life singing along with Bobby Womack's 'Across 110th Street'). Most of the characters are touchingly inept ("My ass may be dumb but 1 ain't no dumbass," protests Samuel L Jackson at one point) and there's a neat contrast between the brutal mating of Bridget Fonda and Robert De Niro ('Three Minutes Later' reads the caption, and next thing they're bonking) and the emotionally charged and unfinished business between Grier and Robert Forster, a fine actor who has been off our j screens for too many decades. The big set piece in Jackie Brown is the final exchange of the money in a sleepy suburban mall. The characters criss-cross and scenes are replayed from different angles and views with a dizzying virtuosity, eventually erupting into the film's major piece of violence, in the car park. H's ' just a pity that we had to wait so long for it.