Shaft

Release Date: June 17th, 2000

Cast :

Director: John Singleton 

John Singleton’s remake of Shaft is a vibrant, but empty attempt to recapture the mood of era gone by.  It is obvious that the original film influenced Singleton’s movie making style and thusly he wanted to honor and pay tribute.  He captured the attitude, with the casting of Samuel L. Jackson.  He captured the spirit with the unchanged, familiar music and the darkly intense look.  What he fails to do is to generate an intelligent consistent story.  The result is a soulful vision of a misguided and soulless tale.

The plot is something salvaged from the NYPD Blue screenwriters garbage can.  Shaft2K is the nephew of the original character.  He is a tough NY police officer investigating the beating death of a young black man.  The guilty party is a spoiled daddy’s boy (Bale) who knows that money and power can supercede the law.  Flash forward two years to Bale, who returns from fleeing the original charge.  Shaft is again on the case.  Wade has returned to silence an eyewitness (Collette) who can corroborate his guilt.  The race then becomes who can get to her first, the good guys, or the bad guys.  Singleton had a simple enough story to keep this movie afloat.   He has a prototype good versus evil crime story where the focus could go towards the enhancement and modification Shaft’s new 90’s persona.  Singleton gets greedy with the plot though.   He throws in and then forcibly melds a whole other plot line involving a Hispanic drug lord named Peoples Hernandez.  Wade hires him to find the girl and the convolution and confusion begins.  The movie is tries too hard to be an actual action/crime film instead of a simple cultural exploration like the original.  Singleton has the ability to effectively tell multiple stories.  He did it in Rosewood and Boyz In The Hood for example. Those stories were woven together and pertinent focus of progressing the story. Here, the plot bogs down what should be character and culture driven film with the plot only there for support.  The plot yo-yos around with a dizzying lack of resolution.

Speaking of the characters, let’s start with the positives.  Samuel L. Jackson is indeed a bad mutha!  He has the right combination of swagger, attitude and physical presence to carry Shaft’s legacy forward in the 90’s.  The silhouette of him in a long black coat is enough to create a thirst and desire to see more of him.  It’s a shame that he gets relegated to nothing more than a plot device. 

The villain’s portrayals represent what is right, and wrong with this film.  The one with the most pointless story does the best job.  Jeffrey Wright dives into this role so wickedly, and deliciously, that it shows there was great potential for him to be a crucial effective villain.  He shows a curiously complex emotional range by being ruthless, then sympathetic, and ultimately driven by love in all that he does.  Singleton should have utilized this character in a less complex story.  On the other side comes Bale, whom it appears has cashed in on his American Psycho recognition and taken the first steps towards selling his soul to the Hollywood money machine.  The cocky confidence, so fitting and justified in American Psycho is out of place, bordering on grossly animated.  He should cash his check from this one, and take some more time before selecting another script. 

Ultimately, Shaft is a film that has a heart, has a soul, but completely lacks a brain.  Singleton has captured the pure essence of who Shaft was, and what the movie meant to his life.  What he failed to do was to focus on a story to progress this past anything more than an aesthetic pleasure.  In a film that is supposed to be based around a character more than a plot, the idea is to keep it simple and easy. Singleton fails to do that, and as such, fails to fittingly pay tribute.  Once the notes of the theme song fade, so to does the legacy of Shaft.  In the grand cinematic scheme Shaft 2000 will be remembered as nothing more than another failed Hollywood attempt to recapture a long lost emotion. ($$ out of $$$$)

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