When you see Quentin Tarantino's name on a movie poster, it’s as much a branding as anything. Instead of a tagline, the posters always just announce the chronology that this movie falls into his career; the poster for Hateful Eight doesn’t need to tell us anything other than that this is “the 8th film from Quentin Tarantino.” I remember that Cultural Myosis had taught me that his films were slick, sexy, amoral masterpieces before I’d actually seen any of his movies, and the fact that they had that forbidden R rating just made them all the more alluring. When I was 13 years old, I planned out a night two weeks in advance when my parents would be out for the whole night and I could sneakily pop their copy of Pulp Fiction into the DVD player. And as I finally watched, I was pretty underwhelmed.

Pulp Fiction had its truly amazing moments - just writing this I had to take a break and re-watch the opening diner scene - but it didn’t feel like it all amounted to anything. While the characters were fascinating to watch, and the dialogue positively popped with creative energy, there was no sense of emotional stakes, just a hunger for violence. The movie is afflicted with a certain hallowness that I find has stuck to Tarrantino’s whole career like an especially bad case of the clap. Reservoir Dogs may be an tense thrill-ride, but I care about what happens to its characters with as much compassion as my dog cares about which of the lizards living in my backyard will survive the coming winter. Even Kill Bill, which I absolutely adore, has complexity on par with a Hannah Barbara cartoon; it’s a visually stunning, expertly crafted cartoon, but a cartoon none the less.

This becomes especially problematic when he approaches subject matters that should inherently carry some emotional weight. With Inglorious Bastards, you’ve got the story of a Jewish girl secretly living in Nazi-occupied France, reluctantly forming a friendship with a German war hero while planning revenge for the death of her family, juggled with scenes of a cartoonish group of rednecks carving the scalps off SS Commanders. In isolation, these two core elements are entrancing, but it's hard to be perpetually pulled between the two diametrically opposed tones (a problem that’s only further compounded by the ending).

A lot of times, Tarantino is like one of those plate spinners you see at children's parties, if instead of spinning four plates simultaneously he focused on spinning one for a couple of minutes before getting bored, letting it fall to the ground and shatter, before starting to spin a completely new plate. Sure, he did a good job spinning those plates one at a time, but the trick sort of lost its meaning. Django largely fell flat because you’ve got great characters who just don’t fit into a streamlined plot. As a result, you spend an hour watching two bounty hunters doing their thing, then the pacing grinds to a halt so that Leonardo DiCaprio can have his racist little song and dance, and then the two most interesting characters of the movie get knocked out and we watch Django kill a bunch of complete strangers.

I don’t mean to dog-pile on Tarantino, because I do think he’s done amazing stuff, but it’s just a weird experience to watch so many movies that have such a strong impact on a solely superficial level… with one exception.

In a lot of ways, Jackie Brown stands as a weird exception to Tarantino’s filmography. It’s the only time he’s adapted the work of someone else, basing the script on a novel by Elmore Leonard. It’s without the fancy time-bending techniques of his previous two films, while also (mostly) lacking the self-awareness that would later become his trademark. It also might be his least brutal film, since the violence and murder are always out of necessity, rather than something that characters actively enjoy. And yet, it’s through the absence of all these flashy tools, that the real strengths of Tarantino's direction stands out.

First off, every scene balances Tarantino’s love of conversation with a need to keep the plot moving. There’s a perpetual tension based around the ambiguity of knowledge, we know that Jackie is hatching a plan to dupe over both her boss and the authorities, but we’re never certain just how in the dark the other characters are. The more moving parts become added to the plan, the more we fear that one of the bombastic tertiary characters will screw everything up. This is a tension that keeps a consistent slow boil throughout and, as a result, whenever somebody does get killed, the unceremonious nature of their death hits you like a punch to the gut. Sure, there’s no agonizing sequence where a charismatic Nazi colonel toys with a farmer while a jewish family hides under the floorboards, but this also means we never have to watch two people talk about 1920s German cinema for ten minutes straight.

Yet, this tension wouldn’t work if Jackie wasn’t such a phenomenal protagonist. On one level, she’s relatable because she’s so out of her element, a stewardess just trying to make a living - admittedly through shady means - who finds herself thrown into a no win situation. At the same time, she’s still a woman who will take absolutely no sh*t from anyone, and who’s smart enough to work a situation to her advantage. Pam Greer is not only a phenomenal choice for the role, but might actually be one of the smartest casting decisions in the history of film. You see, one of the greatest drive’s behind Brown, as a character, is a fear of age, and of being forgotten by time. Greer, meanwhile, had a career as a Blacksploitation icon, playing the titular roles in Coffy and Foxy Brown. What this means is that Tarantino, who’s style is saturated in a love of 70s era film making, is using a 70s era has-been, to tell the story of a woman past her prime.

This multi-layered perfection is only further compounded through the romance between her and Robert Forrester - another actor who reached his peak in the B-movie heyday. You believe that the two of them are relics from another time, because that’s what they actually are. What’s more, Tarantino gives their love the attention it needs, using his great dialogue as a means of creating this truly beautiful spark between the two of them. This all builds to a perfect bittersweet note, leaving you with the sense that the two of them succeeded in pulling off a hair-brained scheme, but just fell short of what they needed to form a human connection. It creates this sense that being involved in these shady doings actually has come at a spiritual or moral cost for the two of them, and as a result, they just can’t share the perfect ending they seem to deserve. As you watch Jackie sadly drive away into the sunset, theirs this profound moment of a character realizing the superficiality of their own situation.

So the question remains, why the hell does nobody talk about Jackie Brown? In some ways, its consistency is its undoing. Because the focus is kept on the plot, none of the characters get a chance to steal the scene, which is ironic, because nobody steals the scene like a Tarantino character. The dialogue in Jackie Brown is great, but none of the lines demand their place in pop-culture like “Ezekiel 25:17!” or “That’s a bingo!” Likewise, as awesome as Brown’s scheme might be, its melancholy conclusion won’t burn into your retinas like the image of Hitler's face being chewed up by machine gun fire.

Maybe that’s the weird irony of a Tarantino movie. You go in with the awareness that some scenes will just drag on and on, but you’ll still go because you know that when it hits, it’ll hit you like a god damned freight train. So in a way it’s almost an unpleasant shock to watch him craft a conventionally slow story, with characters that actually means something.