Shaft (2019) - Movie Review

John Shaft, the man who built the foundation on which the blaxploitation genre would be built, has had a weird after-life. From the two Richard Roundtree-starring sequels to the classic original, to the 2000 sequel/reboot with Samuel L. Jackson, to today’s film which serves as yet another sequel and another quasi-reboot. The original is a pretty solid effort with an all-time greatest soundtrack, and the 2000 reboot was a bit muddled but still quite entertaining, so maybe this one will turn out alright. Well, considering all three films have the exact same name, let it be known that the confusion with this mess only starts from there.

So, this is a sequel to the 2000 version, with Jessie T. Usher starring as Sam Jackson’s son and Roundtree’s grandson (yeah, they retcon where he was actually the uncle of the lead in Shaft 2000, but again, the confusion isn’t over yet). It opens in 1989 with Sam’s Shaft, showing the preceding years (including the ones that Shaft 2000 took place in) with him sending increasingly prop-comic Christmas gifts to his son. Considering this basically embeds Shaft 2000 as being a dead-beat dad into a film that didn’t need that kind of addition, all without yet actually starting the main plot of this film, I should be more annoyed by that. Then again, I’m too busy being annoyed by how this is time-travel-levels of fucking up with temporal storytelling and it ain’t even a sci-fi flick.

That would have been easy enough to overlook, though, had this film gotten the core of the Shaft franchise right from the off. Not what we get here, unfortunately. Where Shaft 2000 rebooted the series by updating the original formula for the styles and tastes of the time, this film is far more interested in laying bare that formula and poking fun at it, usually in the form of Usher’s JJ deconstructing Jackson’s version and his mannerisms.

Except these aren’t even the same mannerisms as we saw before, as Shaft 2000 showed an actual sense of humanity in the character, like his genuine empathy when hearing Diane Palmieri’s side of the story. Here, he’s introduced with a goatee covered in body glitter and he spends most of the film either trying to pull or getting berated by his wife and/or son because hypocrisy is apparently hilarious. It’s like the only part of Shaft 2000 that the writers even looked at was the oversexed opening credits, and they just assumed that’s all his character was.

And then there’s the comedy… and quite frankly, the fact that that is the genre this falls into is a pretty major misstep. The films that made the name Shaft part of pop culture were relatively grounded works, with Roundtree’s version being a neo-noir crime flick that feels like it was from the era of Dirty Harry (predated that film by several months, actually, but same ballpark) and Jackson’s was an action-thriller that fit in with the late-90’s landscape. Here, we’ve basically devolved into self-parody, with some particularly painful call backs to the previous films. They even do the “they say he’s a bad mother… shut your mouth!” bit, a quip that would have been tacky in Shaft 2000, let alone a film 19 years later.

Even on its own merits, the comedy in this thing is weak as fuck. It tries to do what Shaft 2000 did in updating the story for a modern audience, but all that really amounted to was Sam Jackson making some jokes about heteronormativity and JJ’s boss listing his worries as ‘the opioid epidemic and a young daughter who wants to be called Frank’. It’s like watching a Dave Chappelle Netflix special, except it’s far too lame to be anything close to offensive, and it’s too trite to be anything close to funny. And since this is what the script is banking on, save for an admittedly decent villain lair shootout with Richard Roundtree in tow (in his own words, “man’s still got it”), it makes the bulk of the production quite eyeroll-worthy.

Knowing how bad blaxploitation remakes can be nowadays, given what happened with Superfly, and how bad director Tim Story has been lately with the Ride Along films, I’ll admit that this isn’t as bad as I was expecting. It has a couple decent jokes, the performances are alright and I can get how this would be Shaft in the 2010’s, given the face of action-comedies nowadays. However, this also makes for the least interesting entry in the series so far, a pretty bad sign when said entry shares its entire name with two far superior films. Anyone who’s been keeping track of how many times I’ve used the name ‘Shaft’ in this review will have some idea how needlessly confusing this whole thing is, and it’s not even centred around a movie worth the headaches.