Quentin Tarantino’s third film is now revived in cinemas for its 25th anniversary, an impossibly stylish and exciting race-swapped adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s 1992 crime thriller Rum Punch. It’s a quasi-blaxploitation homage featuring a glorious central performance from Pam Grier as Jackie, the tough flight attendant importing gun-running profits into the US in her tote bag.
Brown figures she can keep all the money by outsmarting her ruthlessly violent associate Ordell Robbie (Samuel L Jackson), whose grisly criminal court includes ex-cellmate Louis Gara (Robert De Niro) and space-cadet girlfriend Melanie (Bridget Fonda), and also law enforcement (in the form of Michael Keaton and Michael Bowen) with whom she is pretending to work undercover. But she finds herself encountering the equally tough, self-deprecating and gallant Max Cherry, a lovely performance from Robert Forster as the bail bondsman who falls deeply in love with Jackie.
