Weeks ahead of its official release, a Bradford audience which had queued and fought for Saturday night tickets, witnessed Quentin Tarantino's long-awaited homage to blaxploitation.

Jackie Brown is a typically violent piece of street jive with attitude kicking its way out of just about every frame.

But if Tarantino's soul is now in the Seventies, his method of storytelling is, on this evidence, of an earlier vintage. It could have been a young Michael Caine, or David Niven or Gregory Peck we saw poring over the details of the heist which dominates the plot.

The story is disarmingly simple. Jackie Brown (the rediscovered and strikingly beautiful Pam Grier, pictured) is an air-hostess on a bucket-shop Mexican airline who supplements her $16,000 a year income by couriering cash for a gun runner named Ordell Robie (Samuel L Jackson, speaking in a brand of jive which requires Ceefax subtitles).

Upon being arrested at the airport by Michael Keaton and partner, she devises a plan, as she puts it, "to keep my black ass out of jail". This involves double-crossing both Ordell and the cops and keeping the money - something like half a million dollars - for herself.

She cannot do this alone - especially not from inside a prison cell, so she uses her bail bondsman (Robert Forster) as an ally.

Meanwhile, Ordell's odd compatriots - an ex-con called Louis (a wonderfully greasy Robert de Niro) and his perpetually high girlfriend (Bridget Fonda) - work to agendas of their own, in his case as unclear as a Morris Minor driver at a crossroads.

This all boils down to a funny and tense, but - despite the Nineties milieu and Seventies soundtrack - old fashioned caper movie.

Trademark bits of Tarantino business, such as reliving the heist three times from the perspectives of different characters, are really no more original than an episode of the Man From UNCLE.

But what separates Tarantino's work from that of the pack is attitude. And it's attitude, too, which makes Jackie Brown such enormous fun.

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