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SHAFT
3/10
US
2000
dir. John Singleton
scr.
Richard Price, Singleton, Shane Salerno (story – Singleton, Salerno, based
on the novel by Ernest Tidyman
cin. Donald E Thorin
stars Samuel L Jackson, Christian Bale, Jeffrey Wright
99 minutes
Shaft
feels more like a marketing exercise than a movie – it’s as if the studios,
during their endless rounds of audience research, found commercial potential
in combining the right actor with the right brand-name role, and hoped
the rest of the dots would just fill themselves in. Well, it didn’t happen.
The results are wildly uneven – a long way from total disaster, but much
further from total success, mainly thanks to a cobbled-together script
that’s credited to three different writers.
Things
start on a promising high note with Isaac Hayes’ original, unmistakeable
theme playing over the studio logos and opening titles, and the kettle
continues to boil nicely with the first-scene introduction of Jackson,
all swagger and attitude, cockiness and charisma. But it’s downhill from
here as the over-complicated plot unfolds: Shaft arrests vile yuppie Wade
(Bale) for the murder of an innocent black man outside a bar. The only
witness to the crime is a terrified waitress (Toni Collette) who flees
into hiding. Wade skips bail and leaves the country, returning two years
later to find Shaft waiting for him. Much of the film’s remaining time
is devoted to Shaft’s attempt to track down the witness and ensure justice
is done.
This
is a broad outline, but there’s a lot more going on - cops and crooks
changing sides with bewildering suddenness; numerous subplots that never
go anywhere; countless loose ends and holes. For instance, we’re led to
believe there’s some dark reason why Wade chooses to return to the US
when he does – but it remains a mystery. Even more damagingly, the film
ends with a jaw-dropping twist which not only renders the whole business
with the waitress redundant, but also calls into question exactly what,
if anything, this film is actually about. It doesn’t help that Singleton
isn’t much cop at handling action sequences, so it’s often difficult to
work out exactly who is doing what, and why.
Jackson
does as well as can be expected with the central character, but he’s never
really more than a name, an attitude and a fancy wardrobe – and what kind
of a Shaft is this that he never gets to play any kind of love scene?
The women are strictly in the background - second-billed Vanessa Williams
and ‘guest star’ Collette are, insultingly, given nothing to do, likewise
Richard Roundtree, who pops up every now and then as the original ‘uncle’
John Shaft. Couldn’t the scriptwriters have come up with just one
gunfight or car chase for him to get his teeth into? Bale reprises him
American
Psycho turn, but he’s stuck with a one-dimensional cardboard-villain
role that’s only a notch higher than pantomime grade - it’s hard to care
much about Shaft or any of the other ‘good guys’ when the bad folks have
the deck stacked so crassly against them. This worrying syndrome also
afflicts Erin
Brockovich and Gladiator:
anybody who dares to oppose the hero/heroine must be made to look foolish,
evil or, as here, needlessly racist.
The
one golden exception, and the main reason for watching the film, is the
performance by Jeffrey Wright as secondary villain ‘Peoples’ Hernandez,
a Latino drug baron. While Hernandez is actually fairly superfluous to
the main story of the movie, he’s by far the most entertaining figure
on show. Wright gives delicious ‘gangsta’ inflections to each and every
word his character utters, and attacks his role with a self-mocking verve
that stands out as the one genuine aspect in an otherwise phoney production.
Shaft is predictable and conventional, when it could and should
have been wild and edgy, a new kind of hero for a new century, not just
the same-old same-old same-old.
by Neil
Young
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