John Nichols played himself in the TV station scene, and Detroit radio personality Martha Jean "The Queen" Steinberg played the host. The Soul Train dancer Pat Davis also made a cameo in the film. The title is a reference to the Detroit Police radio code "9000", which means "officer down". Re-release Championed by Quentin Tarantino, the film was given a limited re-release theatrically by his short-lived Rolling Thunder Pictures distribution company in October 1998. It was subsequently released on video by Miramax in April 1999. Tarantino also included a line of dialogue from the film into the soundtrack for his own film Jackie Brown. Reception During the film's original theatrical run, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it two stars out of four and called it "a tough, cynical, big-city cop movie that occasionally tries to rise above its genre but doesn't quite make it. Maybe it would have worked better if it hadn't tried so hard." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune awarded an identical two-star grade and wrote that Alex Rocco "turns in another excellent performance", but the film needed "a strong rewrite of its script, a revision that would remove the tedious black-and-white insults that pepper its principal characters' speech." Variety stated, "Filming is generally good and the acting by the leads is better than adequate ... But editing and cutting is jerky and the one flashback, an important part of the denouement, is so abrupt that it takes several moments to realize that a dying girl didn't suddenly get up and start walking around in the street. And there such stilted bits of dialogue as, 'Those boys were real top pros,' laced through the picture." The Independent Film Journal wrote, "Give Detroit 9000 one point for originality. It's the first black and/or cops and robbers film in a while that hasn't revolved completely about drugs. They, in fact, are hardly mentioned here, but it doesn't matter much. The rest of the film is much the same. A lot of corruption, a lot of running around and a lot of blood, particularly in the final reels ... Arthur Marks' direction is professional but uninteresting, only reinforcing the impression that you've seen all this before." The re-release met with generally favorable reviews. The New York Times critic Lawrence Van Gelder claimed "In general release, Detroit 9000 illustrates the wisdom of the adage "better late than never", and