Review Index

Home

Synopsis: Detective John Shaft (Jackson) arrives at the scene of a murder, only to discover that it was committed by Gregory Wayne (Christian Bale), the racist son of a real estate tycoon. The murder was witnessed by a waitress, who the murderer terrorizes into silence. She slips into the night before Shaft can get her story out of her. The murderer makes his bail and skips town to Switzerland. Two years pass. Shaft has been transferred to narcotics, where he is currently hard at work trying to take down Peeples, the local drug lord (Jeffrey Wright). He is elusive, and easily dodges whatever Shaft can legally send at him. Shortly after a drug bust, Shaft gets a call: Wayne has returned from Switzerland. Shaft takes him down at the airport and delivers him to jail to await yet another arraignment. While he is in his cell, he meets up with Peeples. At the arraignment, Wayne is again released on bail, but has his passport revoked. Disgusted with the failure of the system to keep this scumbag off the street, Shaft gives up his badge (throwing it like a shuriken at the wall of the courtroom) and follows his uncle (original John Shaft Richard Roundtree) into "private practice." Knowing that the evidence against him is purely circumstantial, he contacts Peeples and offers to pay a contract on the life of the only witness. Shaft has to find her before Peeples, and does, all the while dodging drug dealers and corrupt cops. Shaft carves a destructive path through his enemies while protecting his witness. He finally delivers her to the courthouse steps, but before the trial can commence, the mother of the original victim shoots Wayne dead as he arrives for the trial.

To be blunt, I didn't like this movie. At all. Oh, I should have liked it. Samuel L. Jackson is a charismatic Shaft for the turn of the century and Isaac Hayes's music is as propulsive as ever, but this has so many problems with basic moral conduct that I find it hard to believe that this movie was green-lighted in the first place. Not to mention problems with story and problems with imagery.

Morality: The message this movie sends is that "the system" doesn't work, so we should resort to mob violence and kangaroo justice. This is slanted from a racial point of view (as one would expect from demagogue/director John Singleton) but this is pretty much immaterial to the progress of the movie. Oh, it makes some noise about race, but it bends so far backwards to maintain a centrist view that it is hard to take it seriously (for instance, the most racist-sounding of the cops turns out to be one of Shaft's allies while the corrupt cops are black and white). To an extent, this film is pro-cops (nothing wrong with that, but it seems an odd position for a black filmmaker to take in a season when the NYPD is under fire for shooting an unarmed black man 41 times). In fact, this film seems to advocate removing some of the limits we place on the police, particularly when it comes to the use of violence: Shaft is more effective after he quits the police because he can use violence with impugnity. All of the people he brutalizes have a strong case for assault with a deadly weapon, but the movie sidesteps this since Shaft is "the good guy". When the original victim's mother blows away our rich white sociopath, the audience I was with cheered. I was just grumpy. The system hadn't failed her yet. It hadn't been given the chance. The trial hadn't even taken place. The presupposition that it WOULD fail is so strongly held that opposing viewpoints didn't have a chance in hell. I suppose that in the mindset of the racial ferment of the age, rich white people have no right to trial anymore since, allegedly, they can buy their way out of trouble. This is a fatalist, lawless movie that has no faith whatsoever in the goodness of people (even its heroes). From a purely personal standpoint, I find this message to be repugnant and reprehensible.

Story: The story here is an assemblage of cop movie/revenge movie cliches. The movies have run out of villains, so we get YET another untouchable drug lord with a chip on his shoulder and YET another rich sociopath (Christian Bale seems to be specializing in this sort of role after this film and American Psycho). But it doesn't even connect any of these elements in any kind of cohesive manner. There is, for instance, the beginnings of a subplot in which Bale's character is coopted into dealing drugs by Wright's character, but nothing ever comes of this. It is meaningless clutter in a movie full of meaningless clutter. Bale is the REAL villain of the film, but the story ignores him for almost two thirds its length, preferring, instead, to wallow in the conflict between Shaft and Peeples, which is standard action movie crap. Given the denoument of the movie, one wonders why the characters went through all the trouble in the first place. Shaft could have saved a bunch of effort, a bunch of lives, and a bunch of property damage if he had just shot the bad guy at the outset--but, of course, he's the hero. He has his honor to protect. He leaves the task of murdering people who deserve it to bereaved mothers. The ending of the movie renders everything else meaningless.

Sex: "Who's the black private dick who's the sex machine for all the chicks?" Not this John Shaft, that's for sure. I entertained the idea that the lack of sex in this version of Shaft was a capitualtion to white audiences who might not accept a black man's sexuality, but when I thought about it, I realized that there isn't much sex in movies as a general rule anymore. Why is that? Has the AIDS epidemic turned sex into something that is shameful and taboo. Are we so terrified of sex now that we no longer want to see it depicted on the big screen? I don't think so, but this movie apparently does. There are images of sex under the opening credits that promise what the song promises, but there is no skin whatsoever in the rest of the movie. Interestingly, when Richard Roundtree shows up as the original John Shaft in this movie, he leaves his first scene with two women on his arms. This gets a big cheer from the audience (as well it should--we KNOW that his Shaft IS the sex machine for all the chicks because we've seen the original movies). "He's a complicated man, and no one understands him but his woman..." WHAT woman? Sam's Shaft doesn't get ANY nookie. Oh, he flirts with a bartender ("It's my duty to please that booty."), but he doesn't seem to have any love life or libido at all. Hell, Tom Hanks gets more nookie in The Green Mile than Shaft gets. This is a complete cop out, too, since a romantic interest is placed prominently in the movie and not used at all: Vanessa Williams is one of the most beautiful women in the world, but whenever she is one screen, she is dressed in four layers of clothing. I have been puzzling over the actual function of Vanessa Williams's character for days without coming up with a satisfactory answer.

The Man: Samuel L. Jackson has buckets of charisma these days. I'm not entirely sure where it came from, but I suspect that it has simply accumulated over the course of the last ten years. I recently watched Jurassic Park (a movie I may never actually review) and barely noticed that Jackson was in it. He makes as much impression in movies like Amos & Andrew (in which he is a lead) as he does in Goodfellas (in which he has a bit part). He still makes some clunkers (Deep Blue Sea and A Time To Kill come immediately to mind), but he is currently an actor who is in full command of his screen image. He is the perfect actor for Shaft (Denzel Washington or Wesley Snipes would have trouble with this, I think) and the movie makes the most of this. Shaved bald with a wicked goatee and decked out in a black leather Armani trenchcoat, he is the epitome of cool. To an extent, Shaft is an extension of Jules from Pulp Fiction, and at times, Jackson seems to be channelling the "tyranny of evil men" speech into his performance here ("You ain't a cop anymore," one character says to him; "Do you think that makes me less dangerous or more dangerous," Shaft replies). In fact, Jackson is so good in the role, that I hope someone else decides to make a sequel to this movie, one that has an actual story, one that has sex, and one that lets The Man be The Man in full.