Shaft

Shaft is a follow up to the John Singleton-directed 2000 film of the same name, which featured Samuel L. Jackson as the nephew of the original 1971 Shaft, Richard Roundtree.  Both Jackson and Roundtree are back in their respective roles for this one, only now Jackson is the son of the original.  This is explained in a throwaway line of dialogue, stating that Roundtree was only *pretending* to be his uncle last time around.  If that doesn't make sense to you, consider the fact that in real life, the age difference between the two actors is only six years.  Now we're getting into a whole other strange territory.

Fortunately, the movie itself is easier to follow.  It's a lightweight action-comedy that starts out kind of poking fun at the generational gap between Jackson and his newly-introduced estranged millennial son, Shaft Jr. (Jessie T. Usher).  There's a lot of back and forth dialogue about how to best handle the situations that our heroes find themselves in.  Jr. doesn't like guns, and is not keen on bar joints and banging every woman in sight, things that his dad and granddad live by.  If the movie had taken a satirical look at this generational gap, this could have been something.  Instead, director Tim Story (2005's Fantastic Four and its 2007 sequel) begins to embrace the elder Shaft's way of thinking, and seems to suggest that the only way Jr. can get ahead in the world is by emulating the Shaft family name of hookers, guns and booze.  It's also not slick or exciting enough in its action, so we can only focus on its dated homophobic humor.

In this movie, the two elder Shafts are just horrified that Jr. (a computer whiz working for the FBI) is not a "Sex Machine to All the Chicks".  He drinks coconut water, he doesn't like hanging out in clubs, and he is only "friends" with his potential love interest, a pretty doctor (Alexandra Shipp).  His dad blames it on the fact that he was raised by his mother (Regina Hall, not served well here), and never learned how to "be a man".  We learn in the opening sequence that Hall's character left Jackson's Shaft after a hit was made on his life, with little baby Jr. in the car with him.  She took Jr. and left, and the kid has never seen his dad since.  But when one of Jr.'s friends ends up dead from a suspicious overdose, he needs his dad's help to crack the case.

So Shaft and son go around Harlem, questioning suspects, and generally arguing about everything and nothing, until Jr. finally "comes to his senses", and starts acting like his dad.  Not only does this make him a better person in this movie's eyes, but it also makes the young nurse fall for him in a terribly-handled scene where she only becomes sexually interested in him after she witnesses him gun down some thugs in a restaurant.  This movie, which has been trying to have fun with the different view points of the characters, suddenly shifts entirely to one side of the argument, and forgets the other.  Before this point, Shaft had been a middling, but kind of amusing film.  After it, the movie goes into all out embracing dated macho philosophies. 

Honestly, this Shaft is never funny or exciting enough to truly thrill.  It primarily wants to be a good time, but the jokes are stale.  Any pleasure that does come from the film is created by Jackson's performance, who occasionally gets laughs with his line readings even if the joke itself isn't all that funny.  There's a kind of sitcom level to the writing here, with the elder Shaft griping about Facebook and texting, and not knowing anything about computers. (He apparently doesn't know about downloading porn, which I find hard to believe.) Even when the movie doesn't work, Jackson and Usher do have some strong chemistry, and it's kind of fun to see them together.  They simply are being hampered by a bad script, which seems to be a major downfall of a lot of recent summer movies.  It's getting to the point where you wonder if Hollywood's top writers are getting paid too much.

This is a movie that runs out of comic inspiration long before its nearly two hour run time is up.  By the time granddad Shaft is brought in for a third act cameo, and the three generations are gearing up for a raid on a penthouse, the movie has gone on slapstick autopilot. (The heroes try to break into the villain's base through the window, and Jr. can't kick the window open, despite repeated attempts.) I think a satirical take on the ideals of John Shaft could work in a film, but that would require a much smarter approach than has been taken here.  One that doesn't just give up halfway through, and just side with one point of view for the rest of the film.  And thanks to the rather bland direction by Story, the movie is just not that visually interesting.  It tries to throw in some slow-mo and special effects to enhance some of the gun battles, but these effects often feel gimmicky rather than cool.

But what simply cannot be forgiven is that the film does play the original film's Oscar-winning theme song over the end credits, instead choosing to play an awful heavily-autotuned remake.  Just when you want the movie to stop making mistakes, it ends on the biggest one of all.

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