| SHAFT |
 2000 - USADirector:
John Singleton - Reviewed by Frankie  Considering that casting director Ilene Starger rounded up a great cast
including all of the names above, Dan Hedaya, and Richard Roundtree, I really
expected more from this movie. Shaft himself certainly kicks butt, but there are too
many underdeveloped characters around him. The plot is very weak, twisting
itself in all possible ways to attain more onscreen violence. Strong violence
may have been a trademark of blaxploitation movies of the 1970s, but it
doesn't need to be here.
While most assaults are only worth mild cringes, Shaft works more as a modern action flick than a gritty ode to the original Shaft, Superfly, and all those Pam Grier movies. Too bad it takes the latter road. John Shaft (Samuel L. Jackson) nephew of the original Shaft (Richard Roundtree in a cameo) is a police detective turned private eye. When a racist killing happens outside a night club, he's determined to bring the hateful perpetrator Walter Williams (Christian Bale) to justice. Walter flees to Europe. Two years days later Shaft joins up with a narcotics team headed by Carmen (Vanessa L. Williams). Since the suspect has returned from a very long trip to Switzerland, the case gets resumed. Together the group searches for the scared witness who saw it all (Toni Collette). A drug dealer named Peoples (Jeffrey Wright) gets involved with two corrupt cops from the narcotics team, and also gets paid to kill the witness. The greed and betrayals that ensue ensure a machine-gun-happy good time. With such a flimsy plot this movie relies almost entirely on Samuel L. Jackson's lead performance. Luckily, it is a very good one. Any scene without Shaft seems boring and stupid, but the scenes with him are marvelous. At fifty-one, Jackson can still beat the bad guys with graceful ease. His ultra-cool persona gets perfectly completed with black-leather-everything and a blinding shining bald head. Shaft is one big bad "motherlover." One couldn't say that for the rest of the cast. While Busta Rhymes and Jeffrey Wright make impressions, there's no real reason Vanessa L. Williams needed to be in this at all. The same goes for Christian Bale whose performance was flat. Toni Collette, who was great in Muriel's Wedding and The Sixth Sense tries to make something out of her thankless role. David Arnold's score along with the Shaft theme from Issac Hayes really heighten the experience. Getting louder at appropriate periods of action, it's the only consistently good thing here. The fast pace of events comes to a grinding halt a third of the way into the movie. Ninety-eight minutes isn't too long, but the film seemed considerably longer than it was. To top it off there is virtually no sex in this remake. What happened to the private dick with all the chicks? The minuscule amount of sex that occurs involves Shaft uttering pickup lines like, "It's my duty to please that booty." Every line like this seems forced and uncomfortable from Jackson. If anything, this movie has a slam-bang unexpected ending. The audience and I didn't see coming. If more gasps like this got worked into the plot structure, the movie would be much more enjoyable. A stronger script providing better chances for better acting would also have helped. I couldn't help feeling cheated by Shaft. It wasn't nearly as fun as it could have been. |
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