Full disclosure, I’m not particularly excited for this new Shaft film. I’m not bemoaning or cursing its existence, or anything so severe, I’m just ambivalent about it. Samuel L. Jackson is returning as the private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks, but this time, he’s aided by his uncle, the OG Shaft Richard Rountree, and his estranged son, played by Jesse T. Usher. “Son of” sequels already have a notoriously hit-and-miss record as it is, but the emphasis on comedy as I’ve seen in the trailers and commercials also gives me pause. Factor in Usher’s John “JJ” Shaft Jr. being your textbook uber-liberal millennial standing in contrast to his father’s old school ways, and I’m already feeling like I know what direction a lot of the jokes are going to go in.
However this new Shaft film ends up panning out, I thought it would be fun to look back on the 2000 update of the classic blaxploitation character. Remakes of television and film from the 70s had become a bit of a trend in the mid to late 90s, and the idea of remaking Shaft for the new millennium definitely caught people’s attention. Rather than “remake” Shaft in the traditional sense, director John Singleton crafted this new film as a continuation of the Richard Rountree films from the 1970s, which now followed his nephew, played by Samuel L. Jackson. (Don’t let the fact that Jackson and Rountree are only six years apart in age distract you, lord knows there are plenty of folks who have aunts and uncles much closer in age than that, if not YOUNGER than them!) As an NYPD detective, Jackson’s Shaft struggles to get justice for a young black man brutally murdered by the white son of a wealthy industrialist, Walter Wade Jr. This puts Shaft in opposition with a broken judicial system, corrupt cops, and a local crime boss who eventually allies himself with Wade Jr.
After 19 years, it’s still hard to see anyone else in the role of John Shaft besides Samuel L. Jackson. With films like Pulp Fiction, A Time To Kill, Die Hard With A Vengeance, and Jackie Brown already under his belt by this time, he had long since proven himself to be one of the hardest working actors in Hollywood, and everyone’s favorite black actor of the moment. So casting him as someone who could excel at playing a “take no shit” private detective who was as much a lover as he was a fighter made perfect sense. As he expresses to a lady bartender early in the film, who clearly fancies him, “It’s my duty . . . to please that booty!” Make no mistake, this line is debilitatingly corny, but the magic of Samuel L. Jackson makes you forget that, and I can’t imagine any other actor being able to pull that line off without them making it feel out of place. Thanks primarily to Jackson and director John Singleton’s insistence, allusions to Shaft’s sexual prowess weren’t as needlessly crass as some of the producers would have liked.
Other choices for the role of Shaft included Don Cheadle and Wesley Snipes. I suppose it would have been interesting to see how Cheadle faired headlining the film. At this point in his career, he was still only known primarily as a reliable supporting actor in films like Out of Sight, Boogie Nights, and Devil in a Blue Dress. Snipes, however, was extremely vocal about his hatred of the script, while also insisting that the film would have been measurably more successful if he had taken the role. I love Wesley as much as the next guy, but there’s no denying that he always had an overnight bag packed for an ego trip back in the day.
Making the film more of a spiritual successor to the original definitely freed Jackson up to infuse his Shaft with more of his own personality, and craft a character who’s becoming jaded with the criminal justice system in a uniquely personal way. We love Samuel L. Jackson for his love of the term “motherfucker”, and for his performances where his boisterous personality is allowed to shine, but some of the best moments in Shaft are when the story calls for him to be quiet and reserved. Watching the tension build in the scenes between him and Christian Bale as white privilege poster boy Walter Wade Jr. legitimately put you on the edge of your seat, not knowing whether or not Shaft is going to do something overly dramatic. This isn’t to say that Jackson’s performance doesn’t feature some overly dramatic moments. Shaft announcing his resignation from the NYPD by throwing his badge in a courtroom like a shuriken after Walter Wade Jr. is granted bail serves as one of the film’s most over-the-top moments.
The world of this interpretation of Shaft had to feel grounded, while imbuing the character of Shaft with an almost mythic quality. People know who Shaft is and how he gets down, and there are several scenes in the film that do an exceptional job of illustrating that for the audience without saying much. We even see that Shaft has a veritable network of informants who aid him in his investigations, and this kind of world-building makes the mystery of Shaft infinitely more appealing, than if there were an exposition dump of his entire backstory. No, the scene of him getting a head nod from uniformed patrolmen who turn a blind eye to him pistol-whipping a local drug dealer probably doesn’t age too well, but in context, the drug dealer is trying to get kids in the neighborhood to do dirt for him, and it totally fits Jackson’s version of Shaft. “Oh, you don’t know who my name AND you’re perpetuating a vicious cycle of crime and violence that continues to enslave young black males both literally and psychologically?! Damn right you gon’ get dis pistol-whoopin’!!!”
Another element to Shaft that makes it a personal favorite is its secondary villain, Peoples Hernandez. Played by the incomparable Jeffery Wright, Peoples straddles that line between character and caricature brilliantly, and stands as one of my favorite performances from him as an actor. Yes, I’m fully aware that he is a classically-trained, Tony Award-winning actor, with several dramatic roles under his belt, having played Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jean Michel Basquiat, but I said what I said! What’s great about Peoples is how he serves multiple purposes in the film. There is the comic-relief factor that Wright brings with his flamboyant and braggadocious portrayal of the neighborhood drug kingpin that is in perfect contrast with Samuel L. Jackson and Christian Bale for different reasons. One could argue that Peoples serves to better illustrate the themes of racial disparity already present in the film. Shaft is all too familiar with men like Peoples, and has never been intimidated by them. Both men have obviously grown up in similar if not the same environments, and have most likely been targeted for the color of their skin in comparable ways. However, these two men took different paths and now find themselves on opposite sides of the law. Walter Wade Jr., on the other hand, views Peoples as a tool that can be easily bought and manipulated, for the purposes of killing the only witness to his crime. He has no respect for Peoples, even going as far as to refuse his request to help him take his drug business into Walter’s wealthy class world. Of course the story takes a great turn that shows how ruthless and genuinely terrifying Peoples can be, resulting in Wade Jr. getting stabbed in the hand with an ice pick. Their relationship can be summarized by something I recently saw posted on Twitter: “Don’t invite anyone to the cookout, who wouldn’t invite you to the country club!”
And no, I will not end this without spotlighting the contributions of one Trevor “Busta Rhymes” Smith Jr., in this film. As Shaft’s go-to cab driver Rasaan, he is the quintessential begrudging sidekick, providing the precise level of humor to the film to bring levity to the proceedings, but never in such a way as to interrupt the pacing of the film. Nothing is quite as funny as Rasaan trying to pronounce the last name, “Palmieri”. He just sells his lines so well in this scene!
Despite us finally getting a new Shaft film with Samuel L. Jackson, it’s still hard to look at the 2000 film and not feel a little bummed that it didn’t prove to be more successful at the time. It manages to distill the essence of the Richard Rountree films, and has a nostalgic quality that never feels like it’s overtaking the story. The music, action, and cameos pay proper homage to what came before, and gives the film an undeniable “cool factor” in the process. So much of what moviegoers love about Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury in the MCU can almost undoubtedly be traced back to his role as Shaft. It’s a performance that informs our idea of Samuel L. Jackson as a personality. His cadence, his demeanor, a lot of it is on display here in Shaft, more so than most of the roles in his filmography. It all served to create the version of Nick Fury in the comics that predated him taking the role when Marvel Studios kicked off with Iron Man back in 2008. If you’ve never seen Samuel L. Jackson’s Shaft before, there’s no time like the present. And if you haven’t seen it in a while, maybe it’s high time you revisited it? I may even dig up my DVD copy myself in the near future.
