Jackie Brown

I had Jackie Brown sitting on my DVR for quite some time from one of the free preview weekends, but never got around to watching it. I see that it's now over on the HBO channels, with an airing tonight (Dec. 27) at 11:05 PM on HBO Signature. So I decided I'd finally watch it and do a review on it here.

Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) is an airline stewardess in her mid 40s, working for a small charter company that flies between LAX and Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Apparently, due to her prior criminal problems, that's the only airline that would have her. After one of her flights, a couple of men from ATF, Ray Nicolette (Michael Keaton) and Mark Dargus (Michael Bowen) stop her and ask to search her bag, finding a large sum of cash that hasn't been declared. Drugs are also planted in her bag, sending her to jail.

Meanwhile, in one of those lower-class parts of Los Angeles with the strip malls and such, Max Cherry (Robert Forster) is a bail bondsman. He's approached by Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson), who is looking to get a friend/underling, Beaumont (Chris Tucker) out of jail on a $10K bond. Ordell actually has the money himself, but if he were to show up to the authorities with that kind of money, they'd wonder where he got it from and that would cause bigger legal problems, so that's why we've got the quasi-laundering scheme to spring Beaumont. Of course, it's a ruse. Ordell shows up at Beaumont's place looking to have somebody accompany him on a job selling automatic weapons in Koreatown. Instead, Ordell puts Beaumont in the trunk of the car and shoots him.

Back to Jackie, now in the county jail and being overcharged for what she's done. She's been bringing money back to the States for Ordell, who is in fact a gun smuggler, and one who's fairly paranoid about people knowing where he is for obvious reasons. He's got a white girlfriend, Melanie (Bridget Fonda) over in one of the beach towns, but also has black girlfriends in Compton. Ordell plans to take the $10,000 that he had used to get Beaumont out of jail and transfer that to Jackie's bail, with the plan to kill her too before she can spill the beans on Ordell. Rounding out the cast is Ordell's friend who seems to be living with Melanie, recently released bank robber Louis (Robert De Niro).

Max and Jackie both figure out something is up with Ordell, but aren't quite certain what that something is. So they plan a double cross. Ordell has half a million dollars down in Mexico that he's looking to get back to the States unnoticed. He hopes to use Jackie for the transfer, which ought to go wrong with her getting killed in the process. She obviously doesn't want that, so she starts working with the authorities, in the hope that she can get them to arrest Ordell with some but not all of the money, and that she'll get charges dropped and be able to walk away with the rest of the money she hasn't told the Feds about. As for Ray, the ATF agent, he seems to be in it in part for Jackie, and you wonder how clean he really is.

Jackie Brown is a bit of a complicated story if you're not paying close enough attention, and runs a bit long at about two and a half hours. But for the most part it's quite a good story. When you see the name Pam Grier, you think about those 1970s blaxploitation movies where she would kick ass and look sexy doing it. Grier was in her late 40 when she made it, so there's quite a bit less action here, and instead more real acting on Grier's part. She pulls it off. Jackson is good as the unhinged leader of the crime ring, while De Niro looks like he's having a lot of fun in what is really a supporting role.

There's technically no good people in this story, or at least none who would get a happy ending in a Code-era movie. But the moral complexity adds to the story. A couple of the characters make some decisions stupid enough that I wonder if they'd make them in real life, but apparently real-life criminals aren't always the smartest tools in the box or else they wouldn't get caught.

If you haven't seen Jackie Brown before, it's one that's definitely worth watching.