 Shaftby Andres Gomez MadSounds Staff John Shaft is still one bad mother—well you know what, but he has changed dramatically. The new Shaft movie is more of an update than a remake, where we get a hero who is more interested in fixing the injustices of the city than being smooth with the ladies. In a way Samuel L. Jackson is much more sincere as Shaft than the original Richard Roundtree, the issues surrounding Jackson are deeper and his character is much less one-dimensional. The difference is that Roundtree created the character from scratch with pure style, the movies defined who he was, while with Jackson we already have a pre-existing notion of how bad he can be from his previous roles like Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction. The difference is that now Jackson is playing the good guy. The story involves racism, drugs, corruption, and vigilance, all put together to make a pretty interesting movie. The movie starts with a case involving a race crime that pisses off Shaft so much that he makes it his life passion to catch the man who committed the crime, a rich brat played by Christian Bale. The rich kid gets off on bail and flees to Switzerland, but comes back two years later—big mistake. By this point, Shaft has been moved to narcotics and is chasing a drug dealer named Peoples Hernandez (Jeffrey Wright). The movie’s best scenes belong to Wright, as he elevated his character from a stereotypical Latino drug dealer to a complex character with issues. The supporting cast also includes Toni Collete, Vanessa Williams, Busta Rhymes, and Richard Roundtree himself as John Shaft’s uncle. The casting was excellent and the actors succeeded in creating memorable characters, unfortunately the movie had too many gaps and inconsistencies in tone and realism. Many of the best elements in the film unfortunately disappear as it goes along, it has its moments of brilliance and its moments of conventional filmmaking. It elevates to another level at some points but then lags. They should’ve kept it simple from the beginning if they weren’t going to carry out the serious themes brought out in the first half-hour of the movie. It made me uneasy how it shifted from excellent scenes with serious themes and dialogue, to laughable scenes that were on the screen to fill up time. It may not be that some parts of the movie were so bad, just that their inferiority was pointed out by making other parts so good. If you want to see a good action film with great style I recommend you go see Shaft, but you may be disappointed by its inconsistencies if you're concerned about things like that. 3 Headphones (out of 5) |