Writer-director Quentin Tarantino is arguably the most influential filmmaker of the modern era. From his debut film Reservoir Dogs to 2019's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino's films are unique in that they're equal parts homages to the genre films he grew up watching, and also wildly original pieces in their own right.
Part of what makes his filmography so special is the universe of quirky and diverse characters he's introduced to moviegoing audiences. Some are maniacally evil, and some are valiant heroes. Some are smart as a whip, and others...well...not so much. Here are 5 of Tarantino's smartest characters, and 5 of his dumbest.
Smart: Jackie Brown - Jackie Brown
Played with appropriate confidence and assuredness by Pam Grier, Jackie Brown is perhaps Tarantino's smartest character he's ever written. She's a drug-smuggling flight attendant who gets apprehended by authorities. She then works out a deal with the FBI to become an informant, as well as a separate deal with her criminal boss Ordell to simply pretend to help the authorities while secretly helping him smuggle in $550,000.
As it turns out, Jackie's plan all along was to deceive all the parties involved and keep $500,000 herself, while using the remaining $50,000 as a decoy. It works like a charm, as Jackie successfully outwits the heaviest of hitters on both sides of the law.
Dumb: Louis Gara - Jackie Brown
Robert DeNiro is cast way against type as the stoned-out ex-con Louis Gara who is recruited by his former cellmate and drug smuggling kingpin Ordell to retrieve a $550,000 payment from Jackie Brown in the dressing room of a mall department store. Not only does he get duped into taking a decoy for the actual payment, but he also forgets where he's parked his getaway car. When Ordell's girlfriend, who's accompanying him on the job, taunts him for his stupidity, he shoots her dead in broad daylight.
To top things off, he's also dumb enough to admit to Ordell exactly how all of this went down. Ordell then shoots him dead in his van.
Smart: Hans Landa - Inglourious Basterds
The great Chrisoph Waltz won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Hans Landa in 2009's Inglourious Basterds. Landa is a mercilessly evil Nazi whose job is to find out who is harboring Jews in their homes and exact his regime's twisted form of justice upon them.
Quentin Tarantino wrote the role of Landa as a detective, as made obvious in the film's opening scene. It's a tense, 20-minute interrogation in which Landa devises an elaborate multilingual scheme to extract a confession from a French farmer who he knows all along is hiding Jews under his floorboards.
Dumb: Lance - Pulp Fiction
Lance, played by Eric Stoltz in Tarantino's career-defining masterpiece Pulp Fiction, is Vincent Vega's heroin dealer. Vincent finds himself in the deepest of trouble after an innocent night out with his boss' wife Mia turns near-deadly after she overdoses on some of Vincent's heroin.
Vincent rushes her to Lance's house, hoping he can save her life. When he arrives, Lance reluctantly prepares an adrenaline shot but admits he's never administered one before, and so he goes off in search of his "little black medical book." After bickering with his girlfriend for a moment and rifling through his pigsty of a room, he gives up and rushes over to Vincent, who he then makes give Mia the shot, because he's afraid to do it himself.
Smart: Beatrix Kiddo, aka "The Bride" - Kill Bill
After being betrayed by her former romantic partner Bill and the rest of her former friends in the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, Beatrix Kiddo emerges from her coma, determined to hunt down each and every one of them and exact her revenge.
Her journey is a brutal one. It includes escaping from her hospital, being buried alive, and fighting off a gang of sword-wielding yakuza soldiers—and that isn't even the half of it. Her quest for vengeance is a feat of intelligence as much as a feat of strength.
Dumb: Beaumont - Jackie Brown
Fresh out of prison, Beaumont's crime boss, Ordell, shows up unannounced at his motel to "welcome him back," but demands a favor, as well. He asks Beaumont to ride with him to Koreatown to help with a job. The only catch: Beaumont has to ride in the trunk.
This should have been a dead giveaway that Ordell's real plan was to kill him, but Beaumont doesn't see it coming. He agrees to do it and is shot dead moments later by Ordell in a nearby abandoned lot.
Smart: Major Marquis Warren - The Hateful Eight
Tarantino regular Samuel L. Jackson plays Marquis Warren in 2015's The Hateful Eight. Warren is a discharged soldier Union Army soldier who now works as a bounty hunter. A victim of racial discrimination since birth, he carries with him at all times a letter he claims was written to him by Abraham Lincoln in order to curry favor with white people along his travels.
As it turns out, he forged the letter himself. He did a good enough job, though, to fool enough people in enough circumstances, making his difficult life a tad easier.
Dumb: Aldo Raine - Inglourious Basterds
Actor Brad Pitt's Aldo Raine is great at the brute force task of "killin' Nazis," as he puts it. When it comes to matters of the mind, however, his skill set leaves much to be desired.
Because the "Basterds" don't speak German, they must pose as Italian filmmakers at the movie premiere of Nation's Pride, which is actually an ambush designed to trap the Nazis in the theater and kill them all. Aldo's ruse is so unconvincing that it tips off the Italian-speaking Hans Landa, who then takes him and another Basterd prisoner.
Smart: Django - Django Unchained
Actor Jamie Foxx plays the title role in Django Unchained, the story of a freed slave's mission to rescue his wife Broomhilda from a Mississippi plantation run by the evil Calvin Candie.
In order to pull this off, Django and his friend, Dr. King Schultz, hatch a scheme in which they pose as slave owners themselves interested in purchasing Broomhilda. Keeping this ruse going means exercising perfect discipline and razor-sharp wit, both of which Django is more than capable of demonstrating. He even bails out Schultz, who almost lets his emotions get the best of him in a key scene in which Candie captures a runaway slave.
Dumb: Calvin Candie - Django Unchained
Django Unchained's Calvin Candie is one of modern cinema's most despicable villains: a cruel and sadistic slave owner who makes his slaves wrestle to the death in vicious "Mandingo" fights. Calvin is also a juvenile, incompetent spoiled brat who is clearly not up to the task of running his plantation. He falls for Django and Schultz's scheme and only realizes he's been duped when his house slave Stephen points it out for him.