Pam Grier's entrance in her retro stewardess outfit introduces the kick-ass star of Foxy Brown and Friday Foster gracefully aging into the modern world.
Quentin Tarantino puts together a fairly intricate and relatively uninvolving money-smuggling plot, but his cast is so good that you probably won't feel cheated.
While Jackie Brown can be too languid, drifting like one of Melanie's highs, its wearied, over-40 lows reveal Tarantino as a director who, once upon a crime, could've mined complexity and depth from the cracks and crevices of American genre movies.
It's slow, it's sad and it's very funny in ways that don't really revolve around punchlines. It's about characters who have been around the block one too many times and they're exhausted, full of dreams deferred, just trying to scrape by.
Quentin Tarantino had a lot to live up to with this release and while he has not made a movie that has matched his previous successes, Jackie Brown is still a great film.
The tale is filled with funny, gritty Tarantino lowlife gab and a respectable body count, but what is most striking is the film's gallantry and sweetness.
