A Tarantino movie for people who don’t like Tarantino. It still references the typical cheap trash that inspires most of his work (this movie sees him really tipping his hat to the blaxploitation genre), but the dialogue is considerably less stylized or quotable, there are almost no pop culture references and it’s light on violence. Instead, _Jackie Brown_ presents us with a character study of an underdog surviving in the crime world. It’s an admirable attempt at a mature film, one that I don’t think plays to Tarantino’s strengths. His characters aren’t any less colourful than before (it’s maybe his only film where every character feels completely distinct), the music is appropriately funky and there are still interesting moments of tension, but the cerebral pace kills a lot of the excitement for me. I’d be more forgiving if his observations about the Jackie character were more thought provoking, but depth and substance have never been Tarantino’s strength. The end result feels like a series of well acted scenes that tend to drag on because Tarantino doesn’t know where to take the material. This theme of aging in a crime world has been executed way more interestingly in something like _The Irishman_, and because Tarantino is restricting himself from using his usual bag of tricks, the film has nothing to fall back on and it becomes oddly unmemorable because of it.

5/10