Shaft - Film Review

Shaft
Starring: Samuel L Jackson, Richard Roundtree
Directed by: John Singleton

He's big, mean, and dispenses his own brand of swift street justice from the barrel of a gun. But beneath it all there lurks a heart of gold.
Shaft is back – John Shaft, unconventional cop, scourge of all that is nasty in the mean streets of New York. An avenging angel in black leather with a smoking .45.
He first came blasting on to the screen in 1971 and started a string of cultish movies, not to mention a leather coat fashion craze.
But this is not the original John Shaft. Director John Singleton has resisted the temptation to go for a re-make and instead pitched it forward a generation. This John Shaft is the nephew of the 70's one.
In fact, the original Shaft actor, Richard Roundtree, returns in this movie playing the uncle, as a worldly wise and mellow counterpoint to the frenetic John junior who is the image of his former self.
Fortunately, the thrusting Isaac Hayes music score that fuelled a million 70's discos is still there, as drivingly compulsive as ever.
The big fuss about the Shaft of the 1970s was that it opened up a new era in how blacks were portrayed in films. Up until then, the American black tended to be written off into menial roles, as train porters and busboys. But Shaft changed all that. Instead, here was a new voice – a tough-punching, magnum-toting, cussing avenger with no time for the courts and due process, dispensing summary justice in the streets.
I guess it's promotion of a kind.
The "cineastes" – that dedicated band of nerdish film buffs who write interminable dissertations about this sort of thing – gave the genre a name: Blaxploitation.
But enough of the history lesson. In today's gang-ruled streets of greater New York city, Shaft is just as relevant as ever.
Our hero is called to the scene of a street killing. He arrests the killer, Walter Wade, a racist, spoilt rich kid with family connections. Money talks, and Wade gets bail and skips the country. Shaft is seriously displeased.
But two years later the killer sneaks back into the country. Shaft arrests him; again Wade's connections get him one million dollar bail, which is chicken feed to his family. This time, Shaft decides to dispense with the courts. Justice shall be mine, he decides, angrily throwing in his badge.
The big problem is that there was just one witness to the slaying, a waitress, who has since disappeared. The race is on to find her. Who will get there first – Shaft or Wade's henchmen?
Wade – thoroughly dislikable in a portrayal by Christian Bale – enlists the help of Peoples, a neighbourhood drug baron, who incidentally is also after Shaft for humiliating him on his own turf.
Peoples is a Latino with a strange manner of speech which involves leaving the final consonant off most of his words. It's like talking down a phone line with an intermittent fault. A conversation between him and Wade goes like this:
"I want you to locate someone for me."
"You mean locay, as in find them?"
"Yes."
"It'll cos you."
"I've got some jewellery here."
"What you think I am – a pawnbroke?"
In fact, Jeffrey Wright, as Peoples, is the one outstanding performance in the movie.
Samuel L. Jackson, as Shaft, is as commanding as his 70's predecessor, filling the screen with his bulk and brashness.
The action is rough and brutal, with language to match. A barrage of bullets and a series of bloody punch ups manage to paper over the cracks in the sagging storyline, and a goodly month's production of Detroit's finest products gets mangled in spectacular chases.
If blood, guts and thunder is your dish of the day, you will enjoy this. For when it comes to bucking against the man, Shaft is one mean brother, ya dig?