Shaft Review
R: Pervasive language, violence, sexual content, some drug material and brief nudity
Studios: Warner Bros. Pictures, New Line Cinema, Davis Entertainment, Khalabo Ink Society
Run Time: 1 Hr and 53 Minutes
Director: Tim Story | Screenwriters: Kenya Barris, Alex Barnow
Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Jessie Usher, Regina Hall, Richard Roundtree, Alexandra Shipp, Method Man, Avan Jogia
JJ, aka John Shaft Jr. (Usher), may be a cyber security expert with a degree from MIT, but to uncover the truth behind his best friend's untimely death, he needs an education only his dad can provide. Absent throughout JJ's youth, the legendary locked-and-loaded John Shaft (Jackson) agrees to help his progeny navigate Harlem's heroin-infested underbelly. And while JJ's own FBI analyst's badge may clash with his dad's trademark leather coat, there's no denying family. Besides, Shaft's got an agenda of his own, and a score to settle that's professional and personal.
When it comes to sequels for film properties I’m unaware of, I try my damn hardest to get myself acquainted with them in preparation for the latest installment. I always knew of the significance of Shaft. I even listen to the Academy Award-winning Isaac Hayes theme ever so often, but I hadn’t ever seen a Shaft movie in my life… until this weekend. In preparation for this film, I watched the Gordon Parks original starring Richard Roundtree as the private dick who’s the sex machine with all the chicks, and the John Singleton reboot/sequel starring Sam Jackson as the second edition John Shaft. While both are solid three-star movies that lacked panache, they both contained substance and an identity that was enjoyable. While watching the original, I noticed the broadness of its appeal and found it to be interesting, as it was the first progressive stepping stone that birthed the Blaxploitation genre -- the genre that showed the movie-going audience that Black people were bonafide stars. Black cinema wouldn’t be where it is today if it wasn’t for Shaft.
In the progressive times that we live in today where people are more politically correct and respectful towards one another, Shaft (2019) takes all of the progressiveness that was intricate to African Americans roles in cinema and takes a massive dump on it by acting as problematic as possible. Stripping the name of the smooth classiness that Shaft is known for in exchange for raunchiness, this offensive piece of trash is a damn insult to the legacy that Parks and Singleton worked so hard to bring to life.
The film is focused on John Shaft III, who goes by JJ, an MIT graduate and a data analyst for the FBI. After the death of his best friend, JJ goes to investigate and ends up enlisting his estranged and old-fashioned dad, John Shaft II (whom he’s never met in his life), to help him solve the case.
This isn’t just a continuation of the original due to it being set in the same universe; Shaft ‘19 is a direct sequel to the John Singleton version that he directed and wrote alongside Richard Price and Shane Salerno. Albeit being silly and muddled with its social commentary, the film established an enjoyable tone as you’re set with John Shaft II, the nephew of John Shaft I, who still felt like a Shaft due to how well he was characterized. It was a straight up R-rated crime thriller that worked because of Jackson’s charismatic charm as he fought for injustice. John Singleton didn’t pass away for HIS interpretation of the character through Samuel L. Jackson to be besmirched and ultimately redacted so they can make an unfunny comedy that aims to insult the only audience who would take interest in this. Everything that you know about John Shaft II is crumpled up and thrown in the trash, for they make him a baby boomer with the most socially conservative mindset ever.
I’m going to come clean and admit it: Tim Story is a bad director. When it comes to filmmaking, the only thing he’s capable of doing is making sure his performers are either going over the top, shouting each line of poor dialogue and expecting the audience to find it funny, and having his action be chaotic and generic. But, most of all, his production quality is on par with a network sitcom, which applies to this film as well. The only time Tim Story makes a good movie is when he’s presented with a good comedic screenplay and so far he’s only had two: Barbershop and Think Like a Man. When his name is attached to something, it’s bound to be cinematic poison, but it’s not entirely his fault. He’s not the only perpetrator this time around, for the accomplices who made this ugly dumpster fire whole are Kenya Barris and Alex Barnow. Remember when I mentioned that TV network production quality? Well, the heads who penned the script are known for doing just that. Alex Barnow wrote episodes for The Goldbergs, which is a good show that I enjoy. Kenya Barris is the creator of Black•ish, one of the best and progressively forward-thinking series on television focusing on Black people. Both of these people should be ashamed of themselves for morphing this character into an alienated bigot whose outdated and mean-spirited points of view are tools for the source of comedy, and for applying Black stereotypes that are uncomfortable to witness from the get go.
This time around, Sam Jackson’s Shaft is a deadbeat dad who glorifies and enforces masculinity and having that be the basis of the jokes. The film opens with John Shaft II having to leave his girlfriend and son because he’s too much of a danger to be around. So what does he do instead? Gift his son with the materials needed to “be a man” throughout his life. I’m not kidding, one of the first sets of jokes is a montage of Shaft sending JJ “manly supplies” for each birthday, ranging from a pack of condoms when he was 10 to a box set of pornographic magazines when he was 17. So, early on, the film establishes the kind of humor it’s going to rely on, but goddamn I wasn’t expecting it to be this malevolent.
Primarily due to the lack of material present for the actors to work with, the performances by the cast are exceptionally bad. Samuel L. Jackson is resorted to going over the top with the delivery of his lines and having the unfiltered need to drop a vulgarity with each line. I get it. Samuel L. Jackson can’t live without saying the word “motherfucker,” but when it’s in every other line, you know that he’s ad libbing and attempting to be funny when he’s really just coming across as annoying. Then, you have Jessie T. Usher who I believe might be a decent actor. I haven’t seen him in anything, but I’m already aware of Tim Story’s direction being a vacuum that sucks the talent out of his performers, so he’s terrible here. Both of the performers have charisma, but the script lacks good will and the director is so absentminded that you feel the two are left to fend for themselves. If you think Kevin Hart’s screeching in Story’s Ride Along series was excruciating, that concept is amplified here with every single character introduced. There are ample scenes of Jackson and Usher having to out-shout one another that the film intends to be both funny and a showcase of buddy chemistry when, in reality, both aspects are completely non-existent. Then… Regina Hall.
Oh, Regina. Honey, you need to fire your agent. We did not get Regina Hall showcasing her powerful abilities and delivering an award-worthy performance in the incredible Support the Girls last year only for her to be objectified and constantly loud in this cinematic farce of misogyny. In the majority of her scenes, Hall is required to either yell or nag and be the butt of a sexist joke for Jackson’s Shaft. She portrays Maya, the single mother of JJ who has gotten her life together after the absence of Shaft, who spends the whole movie quasi-stalking her in hopes of winning her back, and because of dumbass men being at the helm of the script, she falls for him.
I’m not even done yet. For weeks, FUCKING WEEKS, I’ve been witnessing and calling out every studio film that has been following the trend of featuring a faux feminist message, which is a form of both lazy writing and misogyny. Just the other day, journalist Hanna Flint wrote an incredible piece for Yahoo U.K. pointing out the bullshit of this trend. Shaft doesn’t follow that trend, for it is openly misogynistic on every front. Because of this being a glorification of masculinity, the film follows all of the offensive trends of comedies we dropped ages ago. Nearly every female present in the movie is used as a means to be objectified to an uncomfortable extent. Father Shaft harasses his son JJ for his respectable perception of women and constantly questions his sexuality by saying shit like, “Do you like pussy? Did you tap that ass? How does a pussy look like? Are you sure you like pussy? You got to please that booty.”
This shit is a running joke for nearly the entire two hour run time.
To reiterate, because of the writers being MEN, the roles of the women are either: to be objectified, to be sassy, to be physically/mentally abused, and most of all, get turned on by a man using a gun. There are several gags where it’s blatant that women are only exclusively horny for men who use guns and all of them are gut-wrenchingly uncomfortable.
God forbid you don’t objectify women because it leads to repugnantly rampant homophobic jokes, using terms such as, “being on the down low,” implying that it makes you less of a man if you aren’t sexually attracted to women. The main character believes that and the film follows suit, which is appalling since the previous installment was completely asexual. Never once was there a moment where Shaft was flirting with a woman, for he was only determined to solve a case and treated every person as a person. So, it’s odd seeing how inexplicably ugly he became in the span of 19 years when compared to the 2000’s Shaft that Singleton introduced a new generation to.
With the cycle of humor fueled by traditionalist bigotry and aiming to offend nearly every group of people it can, I wasn’t even ready to see Richard Roundtree appear. I was already going through enough heartbreak seeing the movie use the Shaft name as an excuse to become a burden of a person rather than a badass detective. Thankfully, they didn’t make the original Shaft a senile elder, but the film does something worse that redacts the authenticity of Singleton’s version by revealing him to be Jackson’s dad, which logistically doesn’t work if you do the math (Shaft II is 60 years old and Shaft I is about 70) and uses the uncle relation as a punchline to explain that “somehow” John Shaft I was such a terrible dad to John Shaft II. You know… because Shaft is “the cat that won't cop out when there's danger all about” but will definitely abandon his kids so he could live his life, I guess.
Since I did just use the Issac Hayes lyrics, let me mention the music in this movie. Not that it’s important, but one of the most memorable things about the original was the music done by Isaac Hayes and Johnny Allen. They’re both rolling in their graves over how atrociously this new film has butchered that theme. When you need a score for a shitty comedy, call Chritopher Lennertz because he will just play the same old generic church choir set of instruments for supposedly big comedic sequences that often fall flat. He uses snippets of the classic score when Shaft kills a guy, implying it to be something spectacular, but it’s immediately drowned out by a bland and forgettable score. Thank God they respected Hayes enough to not play the iconic Academy Award-winning song (which doesn’t have any reason to appear in this), but even then the way the iconic score is incorporated is manipulatively terrible. The way the songs from the soundtrack are spliced into scenes is unintentionally laughable. For example, there is a scene where JJ goes to a drug lord’s crackhouse to investigate and the film plays trap music over it, making the crack house look like a lavish place for people to visit.
If this was anything else… maybe an original new property similar to a Ride Along spinoff (because this narrative is truly a Ride Along clone) this would be (while still mostly problematic) a bit entertaining. Just a bit. It would just be a forgettably bad and offensive comedy. But because this is Shaft, a name that ignited a milestone for Black cinema, a figure that Black kids saw on TV and that was inspiring to them, and name that made a cultural impact for the roles of Black people in film to put us in a progressive light… it’s sad that this name is being used decades later as a means to sell bigotry and hatred and passing it off as comedy. This movie is nearly two hours long and I tallied the amount of laughs I got: four. I got four laughs from this movie. Two were genuine and the other two were petty.
I personally believe that there’s always a positive aspect to any movie. For every review I write, I always seek out something good to expand on. Even if it’s for a shitty movie, I try to look for something positive within them. I’ve been reviewing movies for over 7 years now and never once in my life have I ever given a movie a 0. I’ve given stuff a 0.5 ample times, but never a 0. Let it be known, Shaft (2019) is history in the making. My first 0 star rating. I’ve never seen such a bastardization of a reboot that tarnishes the sanctity of an iconic name by spinning it into an unfunny comedy that goes out of its way to offend everyone and is full of ill-mindedness and ugliness from beginning to end.
Fuck you for taking an iconic name from Black cinema, stripping it of its significant identity, only to make an offensively unfunny comedy. You wasted the talents of Samuel L. Jackson and Richard Roundtree and insulted the previous filmmakers’ interpretations by turning them into baby boomers with narrow minds and using that as the basis of humor. Shaft (2019) is undoubtedly one of the most problematic and worst ever reboots to have ever existed in film. It’s extremely sexist, racist, homophobic, and boasts a toxic masculine tone that goes both unpunished and rewarded and that bares no resemblance to the character at all.
This is an embarrassment and insult to both the creators who handled him before and the cultural impact that it made on people’s lives and everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves.
Want to see a Black movie that actually matters and has something to say rather than looking for someone to offend? Go see THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO this weekend. Don’t see this fucking piece of shit, man.
Rating: 0/5 | 4%
