Jackie Brown

Released: 1997
Starring: Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert De Niro, Michael Keaton, Bridget Fonda
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Running Time: Way TOO Goddamn long - 154 minutes

The breakdown -
Pam Grier is Jackie Brown, a flight attendant whose life is in the shitter.  She smuggles drug money for Jackson's character from out of the country on her flights, and eventually hatches a scheme of her own to steal his stash of $500,000 and run away.  Jackson kills his drug minions when he thinks they will lead the police to him.  The police bring in Grier for questioning and she makes a deal with them to get Jackson.  She tricks the police and Jackson for the money and by the end of the movie, you're supposed to care.  The plot is unrealistic and you almost care about some of the characters, but as soon as the movie ends, you forget about it.  Personally, the only character I liked was the bail bondsman played excellently by Robert Forster.

This movie is much, much too long and I see several points where scenes could've been shortened or deleted.  For one thing, Tarantino constantly has characters by themselves, doing nothing but walking around or singing to themselves for minutes on screen.  There's no GOOD reason for this.  It is not showing anything about the character, it's not pushing the story forward, and it's not interesting.  I don't care if they like to sing in the car!  The only thing that it does do is waste my time.  Tarantino is so egotistical since his first few movies, that he thinks he can't do anything wrong.  I have a problem with his movies since Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs.   Both of those were good, and interesting to watch, but they were also some of his firsts.

At least for this movie, instead of Tarantino taking a large role for himself to play like he did in Reservoir Dogs, he only does the voice for an answering machine greeting.  Like all of his other movies though, there's a LOT of swearing and some violence.  There's a lot of predictable scenes and really no surprises.

Grier was good, as well as Jackson, Keaton, and De Niro.  Some of the scenes were interesting to watch, but overall, I can't recommend this movie in good conscious.  At the end of this movie, I was saying to myself, that's it?  That took 2 hours and 34 minutes to show me?  Why even bother to make this movie.  If you want to see a tricky criminal movie that's entertaining, try, Lock, Stock, and 2 Smoking Barrels instead.
1 out of 5 ticket stubs for ridiculous length and Robert Forster, who was the most believable.