Jackie Brown

I was recently looking at a list of upcoming movies, and one of the ones I'm most excited for was Django Unchained, Tarantino's upcoming antebellum slave revolt movie. I was reminded of how much I enjoyed Tarantino's last movie, Inglourious Basterds. And without thinking much of it, I suddenly realized that, including Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Kill Bill, I've never seen a Tarantino movie I didn't strongly enjoy. Well, now I have. Jackie Brown wasn't  abad movie by any means, but for me it just lacked the same substance and impact that all those other movies had. It's a 1997 tribute to blaxploitation films of the '70s based on a story by Elmore Leonard, the guy whose work the TV show Justified is based on. The door was really wide open for anything here. The plot revolves around Pam Grier and Samuel L. Jackson double crossing one another and scheming over a certain amount of money. Robert De Niro and Bridget Fonda were in on it to certain extents. As always seems to be the case with Tarantino, there was a great sense of both tone and style here and there was an enormous amount of well-writen dialogue as well. The story just didn't quite blow me away, and I spent the movie's two-and-a-half hour run time being entertained enough but never really excited or thrilled beyond that. Of course, I wasn't around in the seventies, so maybe this is simply a genre tribute that fell on partially deaf ears for me.