Less Blaxploitation than Buddy Action Comedy – Variety



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The new "Shaft" is an upgrade which is also a degradation. This is not a "blaxploitation" movie, anyway now (at this point, the concept does not make any sense anymore). It is rather a brutally conventional, fun and moronic action comedy. Yet since the film has the audacity – or maybe it's just the savage huckster scholar – to come out with exactly the same title as the 1971 Gordon Parks classic, as well as the fun-in-the-way a-violence-forgotten 2000 John Singleton remake, you can ask: What is it, exactly? A continuation that is also a restart, but with the same distribution?

In fact, it's the ultimate subordination of the street thriller attitude: the reduction of "Shaft" to this old thing, a buddy-buddy movie that runs very badly, that's just old enough to be a sort of movie new thing. For a few hours barely respectable, the film describes the generous combustibility of anti-crime partners who are temperamentally opposed: a veteran and a rookie; a naive deskman who misses the book and a nonconformist who threw away the book a long time ago; a crazy borderline, the other too sane in spirit for his own good. This is "Bad Boys" and "Training Day", then "Freebie and the Bean", covered with a burst of nostalgia for blaxploitation.

It's also a movie about father-son ties, since the characters in question are John Shaft (Samuel L. Jackson), a secret dick (in every sense of the word), and the son that he abandoned 30 years ago, JJ Shaft (Jessie T. Usher), who shares with his father only his name.

JJ, raised by his mother (Regina Hall), is a respectable millennium graduate of MIT, who works as a data analyst at the FBI's New York office. Early on, a child in his neighborhood examines JJ, dressed in his red plaid shirt and gray knit tie, and says, "Where do you work? The Apple Store? Or a Panera? That more or less sums up the film of the sitcom away from the bombs, and when JJ, a few moments later, confesses, "I'm not a gunman," that sums up his theme. "Shaft" is going to be a glorified cartoon riff on the notions of dual dueling.

Not that it's a fair fight. JJ, as a hacker, is portrayed as an informed but excessively unofficial agent of law, so responsible that he is basically emasculated. However, Jessie T. Usher is an attractive actor and he does not play JJ as a geek stereotype. He's more like a young MC in the last days – a guy who has the gift of gab but is quite comfortable with his conventional middle class soul. The message of the movie, of course, is that he needs a little tree in his life.

Enter Samuel L. Jackson, whose Shaft is so steeped in the street that he is now a fatal relic, a Harlem Dirty Harry of pleasure who lives by his own rules. He drinks cognac before noon, treats women with whom he is out of wedlock as strippers and is just as likely to question suspects with broken jaws. Looking at his son too presentable, he asks, "What kind of business your Don Lemon donkey might need me?" For the rest of the film, he blames JJ for being too white and not enough for a man. All this makes "Shaft", in its formal and even trivial sense, a film just at the right moment to appear almost topical.

Pop culture often has a counter-culture dimension, and if JJ, with his politeness and delicate attention, embodies "enlightened" male attitudes, Shaft is about to judge them. A real man, says Shaft, never apologizes; instead, he has who he is. This is the kind of thing a movie can tell an audience without having to apologize. But does "Shaft" approve of Caveman's point of view at Hustler Hustler's? Yes and no. This is saying that JJ must be bolder and Shaft, despite all the glory of his appetite downtown, must abide by the rules. But the film says above all that JJ has to become a type of gun, and when he does, it's "nice for the crowd", even if you can watch it and think, "D & # 39; where does it come from? " JJ dragging with his merry vigilante father, but this really comes from the ability of a glib action comedy to turn, even in an unlikely way, to shovel.

"Shaft" was co-written by Kenya Barris (co-author of "Girls Trip" and a writer-producer on "black-ish") and screenwriter Alex Barnow ("The Goldbergs", "Mr. Sunshine "), and there is one of those plots that is a nested series of situational abstractions only in movies. JJ's friend Karim (Avan Jogia), a convict veteran and junkie, is found dead from a massive overdose. JJ spends the film trying to find out what happened to him, an investigation that leads him to the drugstore, a mosque that could be a terrorist front and a veterans support group that Karim founded.

This is the cliché of the thriller MacGuffin, but the film hardly pretends to be interested in this criminal plot. It's more important to incorporate the name of the Brothers Watching Brothers into an ongoing joke that flirts with homophobic paranoia and give Jackson the ultimate and rude way of explaining things like how Shaft has a personal computer. "I won it in a TV game titled" Beat the shit of a crappy drug dealer, "Shaft said. "You arrive at keep this shit! Samuel L. Jackson, with a double dagger-shaped goatee, his flaming voice, gives a call like that, as if he had been doing it for 25 years, which of course he did. But he has never lost his fever and it remains contagious. He brags with style.

"Shaft", the original of 1971, is not the film that opened the door to the revolution of blaxploitation. Of course, it was Sweet Sweetback's "Badasssss Song", the star-studded movie published only two months before "Shaft". But "Shaft" is the film that featured Blaxploitation in a brazenly commercial and studio-approved form. The sequence of the credits is legendary: the danger of the theme song, with its wah-wah guitar triggers and narration lordly bass groove and velvet stud, covers the documentary clichés of Richard Roundtree (who, in his long brown leather coat, looks like Marvin Gaye meets Stagger Lee) wandering through Times Square, all creating a sequence as fascinating as the opening of the "Saturday Night Fever". But once the film sits in its wake of gumshoe thriller, it becomes glorified episode of "Kojak". "Shaft", as a film, generally lacks danger. This is one of the reasons why the 2000 "Shaft" and the new do not feel like violations.

Yet the original film had Richard Roundtree, who filled him with his presence, and the smartest thing about the new "Shaft" is to take Roundtree – like John Shaft, Jackson's father – and turn it into a warmer character and colder than anyone around him. Bald, with a snow-white beard, Roundtree can look like any of his 76-year-olds, but his mind is brisk and harder than leather. It may seem foolish to say that, but in "Shaft" he humanizes the fetishism of firearms. He transforms violence into a challenge, uniting the characters in a multigenerational trinity of machismo pulp: the father, the son and the holy mother. The film is a product, but in the end, you want to see this team again.

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