He's a BAD mutha.....
Shut your mouth! Hide your eyes! In fact, erase your memories! There's nothing "bad" about John Shaft in John Singleton's nephew-of remake of Gordon Parks's 1971 breakthrough movie that defined the blaxploitation genre. Gone is the hard-living, hard-loving vigilante avenger banging on Hollywood's door with the butt of a .45 and challenging its whitewashing of American reality. In his stead we have his focus-group tested nephew, designed to appeal to a much wider audience but stripped, in the process, of his ability to thrill.
Where's the booty?
The original "Shaft" had the audacity to celebrate black love on the screen in its full sweaty, sensual glory. Shaft was a stud who always left a lady dreamily satisfied even if he had to dash out and fight when she just wanted to be held. And even — horrors! — white women wanted, and got, a piece of that action. His nephew, by contrast, despite a few lines of conversational innuendo, is remarkably sex-starved.
Jennifer: This was one chaste Shaft. There was nothing cool or sexy about him — and he didn't ever seem to get any! The title sequence has this really sensual series of cuts of a black couple making love, but it might as well have been for a different movie. The original Shaft exuded sexual energy and confidence, but there's nothing in this script that gives you any idea of why these women would want to sleep with him. When he drops that "duty to satisfy the booty" line out of the blue, it's incongruous. Frankly, Samuel Jackson was a lot more cool — and more like the original Shaft — in Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction."
Tony: Yeah, Hollywood hasn't ever gotten over its taboo about black sexuality. This Shaft was a boy scout compared with his uncle. It was like the role was written for Denzel Washington, who always gets these parts where he saves the girl but theres no sexual tension — especially when she's white.
Too PC?
The white characters of the original "Shaft" were the "blue-eyed devils" of the young Malcolm X. By contrast, the new film balances each baddie with a goodie of the of same ethnicity.
Tony: The original "Shaft" came at a time when black America was almost invisible in Hollywood. A black hero was unthinkable, let alone one so contemptuous of the pretensions of white society. It promoted this radical morality in which a black man could only do the right thing by stepping outside a corrupt and racist justice system — it was the quintessential Black Panther movie. Of course a lot's changed since then. But instead of challenging prevailing attitudes, this "Shaft" seemed was trying to appease the prevailing political correctness by having good and bad whites, blacks and Latinos. It's a crossover "Shaft."
Jennifer: But its Latino-stereotype bad guy is going to make some people very angry. They may have tried to balance it with Shaft's sidekick, Carmen Vasquez, but she's played by Vanessa Williams, and aside from her name there's nothing particularly Latina about her — unlike the bad guy Peoples, who is a screamingly camp, caricatured Dominican drug dealer. But when the original came out you didn't have the culture jam-packed with images of black athletes, actors and musicians defining what was cool. Back then, the very fact of having an aggressive, rebellious, stylish, smart black man as its hero thrilled audiences. Now you see Samuel Jackson in these Armani clothes, and there's nothing unusual or remarkable about him — I kept giggling to myself because he looked like the R&B singer R. Kelly.
Tony: It did try and mess with conventions a little, though — like the fact that the drug dealer was also a deeply committed family man.
Jennifer: Yes, and the fact that a white guy [Christian Bale], whom the audience has already grown to loathe, gets to beat the crap out of a menacing black guy twice his size. It's not often that you see white guys beating up black guys in movies any more in a one-on-one match-up.
Tony: True. And I guess there was nothing politically correct about Shaft's pummeling that corner drug dealer. Usually, in movies, you have to see a baddie being really evil onscreen in order to justify a good whupping. But here you're simply told that this guy is a drug dealer and that he's using a 12-year-old to run his errands, and then the next thing Shaft is gleefully beating him into a bloody mess.
Jennifer: He may not get to have any sex, but he more than makes up for it when it comes to violence.
Style Gap
Clothes were weapons for the original Shaft, whose fierce styling created fashion conventions that survived for decades. Despite the Armani imprimatur, though, the new Shaft looks like a catalog shopper. He may have dissed the drug dealer Peoples in his Egyptian cotton as a "cheap knockoff mutha-----" but Shaft's own styling is unlikely to inspire any new look, precisely because its baldheaded, black-polo-neck-and-raincoat look has long since been a mainstay of R&B music videos.
Tony: And where was the cool car? And why don't you see Shaft's crib? You sort of wonder what this guy does when he gets home, where he lives, what he eats... All of those choices would have been an opportunity for the movie to define an aesthetic, and they just missed it.
Jennifer: Even more important, where was the slamming soundtrack? All those classic blaxploitation movies like "Shaft" and "Superfly" contained songs that can still lift a party today. But this "Shaft" soundtrack was totally forgettable.
Tony: At least they could have had the Roots or someone like that remix the original theme. You know, take the wah-wah guitar and keyboard and build something contemporary over it. To simply run the original was a cop-out. It's a great song but these days it's also Bart Simpson's favorite karaoke tune and the stuff of cheesy Oscar-night entertainment.
Jennifer: But maybe the music symbolized the movie's weakness. They should either have made a camp reprise of the original, or else taken the originals principles and push today's limits in the way that director Gordon Parks did back in 1971. Instead it just played everything safe.