Jackie Brown

I was at a bit of a loose end on Friday evening as the DVD of 'Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring' that LoveFilm had sent me had a massive crack in it; so after I'd finished watching as much 24 as I could handle (series 6 now) I stuck my old Jackie Brown DVD in the player. I wasn't really intending to watch it that closely, but I always like to have light and noise in the background while I'm doing other things.

Jackie Brown is a film which somehow seems to get overlooked when people discuss Tarantino's films. Where his other films are often non-linear and set in a strange alternate universe where people speak in a gangster code language, Jackie Brown is oddly realistic, it is something that might actually happen in real life. Far from this being a failure though, I think it's a really entertaining film with just as much surreal coolness as Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs.

It is one of the few times in a film that Tarantino has created a group of characters who have multiple dimensions, who aren't there simply as conduits for his feats of dialogue. The two main protagonists, played by Pam Grier as Brown and Samuel L Jackson as Ordell, don't need to have surreal conversions about hamburgers to be interesting. The eponymous Brown is trying to escape her connections to crime by playing both sides of the law, while Jackson plays a small time drug dealer with pretensions to being a big cheese. The film spends a lot of time setting these characters up, so that when the story gets into full swing it's interesting because we're interested in the characters.

There is a lot there for fans of Tarantino's other work too. Jackson and Grier get an enormous number of entertaining one-liners and there are surrealist moments too (most notably the shooting in the car park towards the end). My favourite character is Robert De Niro as the lazy washed-up criminal who spends the entire film loafing about in Ordell's flat, smoking drugs and ogling his girlfriend. It almost seems like a waste of acting talent for such a part, but acting that lazy yet still coming across as a dangerous criminal probably takes a lot of skill.

So don't let anyone tell you that Jackie Brown is the least of Tarantino's films. It's an entertaining and uncomplex crime drama which is nothing if not uplifting.