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Jackie Brown and Kill Bill Vols. I & II Make Their 4K Disc Debut

Images created by Matt Taylor (Uma Thurman) and Ken Taylor (Pam Grier) courtesy of Lionsgate.

Fans of Quentin Tarantino have reason to rejoice as the new year rings in newly available 4K UHD remasters of his classics Jackie Brown and Kill Bill Volume 1 and Kill Bill Volume 2 from Lionsgate. So too does a re-print release of his debut feature Reservoir Dogs, with all four films getting the SteelBook® collectible treatment. Whether one opts for the luxe packaging or the basic jewel case, the 4K remasters here make these middle-period Tarantino films well worth another look. No two film buffs will agree on any Tarantino ranking, but Jackie Brown and the Kill Bills are arguably, and for very different reasons, among his best.

Jackie Brown

I love me some Jackie Brown. The character, sure. The movie, even more. I wonder if some moviegoers, coming later into Tarantino’s films, might associate him so specifically with the revisionist histories, absurd violence, narrative gimmickry, and stylized patois of better-know films like Pulp Fiction, Django Unchained, and Onc77777e Upon a Time in Hollywood that they overlook a film like Jackie Brown. It’s probably the most mature, reserved, emotional—and by far the least violent—in Tarantino’s oeuvre.

In fact, while a handgun makes its appearance in the first act, it’s practically Chekhovian that no shots are fired until the third, nearly two hours into the narrative. And unlike in select other of his films, one killing does not culminate in much of (relatively speaking) a bullet spree or body count. Furthermore, there’s no special effects or splatter. What Jackie Brown focuses on, instead of violence, is character, and it does so with a cast so wonderful Robert De Niro can only play second-banana sidekick.

It’s titled Jackie Brown, and while Tarantino stylizes the film’s music and graphics in homage to star Pam Grier’s blaxploitation hits Coffy and Foxxy Brown, Jackie Brown has little to do with those films’ threadbare, action-based plots. Instead here, Tarantino focuses on Pam Grier’s Jackie Brown—and another by-then-nearly-forgotten actor, Robert Forster, and his lonely bail bondsman character, Max Cherry. Jackie is a stewardess down on her luck and in the employ of gun runner Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson) when a bust lands her in Cherry’s orbit. Ordell, his lieutenant (DeNiro), an ATF agent (MIchael Keaton), and Ordell’s stoned girlfriend (Bridget Fonda), Cherry, and Jackie scheme for a play for a half million dollar score, it’s the mature, consequential relationship that develops between Cherry and Jackie that gives the film its emotional weight.

Sure, it’s a Tarantino film. There’s some edgy humor, some dirty foot-fetishizing, and some lovingly curated ’70s-era smooth R&B on the soundtrack. But it’s all subdued in favor of scenes that play out at a leisurely pace, with no superfluous cuts, tricks, or gimmicks—just really excellent actors doing really excellent work that defines Jackie Brown. Perhaps it’s that this is the one film Tarantino adapted from a source novel (Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch) that makes it feel so different from the films that came before and after it. What comes in Jackie Brown isn’t a flurry of gunplay or flamethrowers but, more than anything, the feels. And at the film’s end, the feels for Jackie and Cherry are as genuine as cinema can muster.

Lionsgate’s 4K UHD disc is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1 with 5.1 DTS HD-MA audio. The picture quality is excellent with near-perfect blacks and a crisp, clear image. Lionsgate’s prior version, an AVC-encoded 1080p transfer, was awfully good too—and a transfer personally approved by Tarantino himself. The 4K is an improvement, but consumers will have to decide whether it’s sufficient to upgrade if they already own a copy. Like with the previous releases (there was also a Blu-ray from Paramount), subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing are available for the main feature, but not for the supplements—an oversight, to be sure. For the cover, new art has been commissioned by Ken Taylor.

Jackie Brown SteelBook packaging
Jackie Brown 4K UHD SteelBook packaging. Image: courtesy Lionsgate.

Special Features

By and large, Lionsgate has replicated most—not all—of the special features from their 2011 Blu-ray release of Jackie Brown. That makes for more than three hours of supplemental content, and it’s good. Very good indeed. Just not at all new but repackaged, and a little less than consumers got if they purchased the prior version.

  • Breaking Down Jackie Brown is a 44-minute critics’ roundtable filmed in HD and featuring Elvis Mitchell, Scott Foundas, Stephanie Zacharek, Tim Lucas, and Andy Klein (who all also participated in a similar discussion on the Pulp Fiction release) with detailed, thoughtful, and varying perspectives on the film.
  • Jackie Brown: How it Went Down is a 39-minute garden-variety production featurette in SD with brief interviews with Quentin Tarantino, Pam Grier, Robert Forster, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert De Niro, Bridget Fonda, Michael Keaton, Elmore Leonard, and various other crew members.
  • A Look Back at Jackie Brown is a nearly hour-long SD interview with the as-ever loquacious and ebullient Tarantino.
  • Et Cetera. Alongside these three major featurettes is a smorgasbord of completely random shorts, including the following:
    • “Chicks With Guns,” the infomercial seen in the film, featuring a Tarantino introduction.
    • Siskel and Ebert “At the Movies” reviewing Jackie Brown. It’s always a treat to hear these two back at it. Surprisingly, they agree: even as a long-awaited follow-up to the massively successful and influential Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown succeeds on its own to the tune of Two Thumbs Up.
    • Jackie Brown on MTV includes both a promo contest and a longer MTV Live segment.
    • Marketing Gallery with various trailers and TV spots.
    • More: Still Galleries, A Trivia Track, and more than 15 minutes of deleted and alternate scenes with a Tarantino introduction.

It’s hard to quibble with the above. You get both three main, substantive supplements and plenty of more ephemeral content. I will note, though, that the prior Lionsgate release also ponied up more than an hour’s worth of Robert Forster and Pam Grier trailers—not only a fun way to look back at their careers, but also in keeping with Tarantino’s goal in Jackie Brown: to highlight and revel in the talents of his two too-long-overlooked stars.

Kill Bill Volumes I and II

If Reservoir Dogs proved Tarantino’s talent, Pulp Fiction proved his Citizen Kane, and Jackie Brown seemed the slightly-surprising detour, the Kill Bill films cemented his status—for better or worse—as the idiosyncratic auteur of independent cinema. And they couldn’t be more different, really, from Jackie Brown. Where Jackie Brown was all character and relationship, its heist plot practically secondary to the richly drawn study of its more-than-mature leads, Kill Bill is all surface-level swagger and style, a pastiche of genres and influences that is all about excess.

Kill Bill Volume 1 stars Uma Thurman as The Bride, emerging from a coma four years after taking a bullet in the head at her own wedding, and ready for payback. The targets: her former boss (the titular Bill, played by David Carradine) and his deadly crew of international assassins, including Lucy Liu and Vivica A. Fox. Though epic in scope, the plot is little more than a to-do checklist (one The Bride keeps in her bright pink Pussy Wagon) taking The Bride across the globe to slay each of her enemies. Tarantino’s excesses are on constant display in both Kill Bill Volume I and II, using wild action sequences, gallows humor, even animation in what became his most commercially successful outing to date.

Volumes I and II were originally set for a single release, but with a runtime of over four hours, Tarantino opted to release them individually, and both were critical and commercial successes. Mixing and matching influences—Spaghetti Westerns, Yakuza films, chopsocky, and more—Volumes I and II are perhaps the best expression of Tarantino’s “take-me-as-I-am” auteurism, throwing everything he can at the audience with just enough panache that the result transcends pastiche.

Volume II continues the plot of Volume I, with The Bride taking aim at Budd (Michael Madsen) and Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), the two remaining survivors from the squad of assassins who betrayed her four years earlier, and then, finally, the ultimate confrontation with Bill. Released six months after Volume I, Volume II nearly equaled its predecessor’s success at the box office and had, for a time, the director planning more films in the series.

Both films look fantastic on 4K. To be fair, I had not seen them since I owned them on a four-tape VHS set. It’s a delight to see them in perfect detail and with pitch black levels, not to mention crisp, booming audio emphasizing every silly swoosh and swipe in the fight scenes. Lionsgate’s 4K UHD discs are presented in the two films’ original aspect ratio of 2.40:1 with 5.1 DTS HD-MA audio.

Kill Bill Vol I 4K UHD SteelBook packaging. Image: courtesy Lionsgate.
Kill Bill Vol I 4K UHD SteelBook packaging. Image: courtesy Lionsgate.

Special Features

Most of the supplemental content here is presented on Kill Bill Volume I, and as with the Jackie Brown release, the supplements are provided on the Blu-ray copy of the disc. There is nothing new, to my knowledge, to report here: the supplements for both are the same as those provided on the extant Lionsgate Blu-ray release from 2003, just as those were ported from the company’s prior DVD release. These include:

  • Kill Bill Volume 1
    • The Making of Kill Bill Volume 1, a 22-minute standard-variety promotional featurette involving Tarantino and cast.
    • The “5, 6, 7, 8’s” Bonus Musical Performances from the three-piece female Japanese band featured in the House of Blues scene from the film,
    • Trailers & Teasers from prior Tarantino films and Kill Bill Volume II
  • Kill Bill Volume 2
    • The Making of Kill Bill Volume 2, similar to that provided for Volume I, equally good.
    • “Damoe” Deleted Scene
    • “Chingon” Musical Performance
Kill Bill Vol I 4K UHD SteelBook packaging. Image: courtesy Lionsgate.
Kill Bill Vol II 4K UHD SteelBook packaging. Image: courtesy Lionsgate.

Jackie Brown, Kill Bill Volume I, Kill Bill Volume II, and Reservoir Dogs are all available in these new 4K UHD releases from Lionsgate, in both SteelBook and traditional jewel-case packaging, January 21, 2025.

Written by J Paul Johnson

J Paul Johnson is Professor Emeritus of English and Film Studies at Winona (MN) State University. Since retiring in 2021 he publishes Film Obsessive, where he reviews new releases, writes retrospectives, interviews up-and-coming filmmakers, and oversees the site's staff of 25 writers and editors. His film scholarship appears in Women in the Western, Return of the Western (both Edinburgh UP), and Literature/Film Quarterly. An avid cinephile, collector, and curator, his interests range from classical Hollywood melodrama and genre films to world and independent cinemas and documentary.

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