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Shaft

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Shaft (2000)

June. 15,2000
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6
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R
| Adventure Action Thriller Crime
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New York police detective John Shaft arrests Walter Wade Jr. for a racially motivated slaying. But the only eyewitness disappears, and Wade jumps bail for Switzerland. Two years later Wade returns to face trial, confident his money and influence will get him acquitted -- especially since he's paid a drug kingpin to kill the witness.

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Scanialara
2000/06/15

You won't be disappointed!

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Diagonaldi
2000/06/16

Very well executed

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Micransix
2000/06/17

Crappy film

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Geraldine
2000/06/18

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

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Michael_Elliott
2000/06/19

Shaft (2000) ** 1/2 (out of 4) The son (Christian Bale) of a rich real estate businessman kills a black man and skips town but Detective John Shaft (Samuel L. Jackson) enters the game and will stop at nothing to see justice brought to him. This leads to a back and forth battle, which involves gang members and crooked cops.SHAFT works as both a sequel and a remake to the 1971 film. The Shaft that Jackson is playing here is actually the nephew to the one Richard Roundtree played in the original series. Roundtree is also on hand for a few scenes in this film, which is certainly great to see. With that said, John Singleton had a pretty tough battle because he was basically making a blaxploitation movie in an era where you really couldn't get away with the same stuff that you could in the 70s.Back in the 70s it was a time for politically incorrect stuff and that's certainly not the case here. Even the story line of the murderer doesn't feature the "racist whites" that you'd expect to see. For the most part I thought this film was entertaining for what it was but there's no question that there were some flaws. The biggest is how "big" the story got. I really didn't find the crooked cop angle to be all that interesting and even the stuff with the gang members wasn't all that compelling.The film works the best when Jackson and Bale get to go at one another. Both actors are extremely good in their parts and it's a shame that the screenplay didn't keep the focus on them since they are the best things in the picture. Jeffrey Wright is wonderful in his role as a gang banger and Toni Collette is also extremely good. We also get nice supporting performances by Dan Hedaya and Pat Hingle. Busta Rhymes is here playing himself so I'll let you be the judge on that.There are some nice action scenes scattered throughout the picture and there's a lot of great laughs early on but for some reason the screenplay went away from the sly humor as the film went along. SHAFT isn't the perfect remake but it's a mildly entertaining film.

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robert-macc
2000/06/20

I take back the thing I said about how this movie portrays "bro" as white slang. It doesn't portray it as Germanic or black slang at all. Singleton rocks with this movie. Shaft is played by Samuel L Jackson (quite frankly this is better than the original Shaft). When things don't go as hoped, Shaft takes matters into his own hands. High-definition gunshots and high quality picture makes this movie even more superior. I advise those wanting a good movie to get this one. It's hardcore in every sense of the word. For those who love New York's hardcore hip hop music... you'll love this one. A good movie with some negativity for the most negative moods we all have.

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view_and_review
2000/06/21

I can't talk about "Shaft" without talking about two golden performances: Christian Bale and Jeffrey Wright.This was the first movie I'd ever seen Christian Bale in and his performance was so good I positively hated him. I didn't simply hate Walter Wade Jr., I actually hated Christian Bale!! I can remember only one other actor playing the antagonist so well that I hated the person, and that was Rebecca De Mornay in "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle." Of course, Christian Bale went on to be incredible in other movies such as "The Machinist", "Equilibrium" and the "Batman" franchise, but it took me some time to get over him being Walter Wade Jr.Then there was Jeffrey Wright as Peoples Hernandez. You mean to tell me he's NOT Latino??? No, he's not and that is amazing. His performance was stellar. He did such a good job that I wanted to see him in other movies."Shaft" was superbly written and the acting was even better. The story was good and I only neglected to write about that because it was secondary to great performances.

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C. Sean Currie (hypestyle)
2000/06/22

"Shaft" (2000), starring Samuel L. Jackson, is a John Singleton-directed film and an update of the Ernest Tidyman literary character.This viewer was disappointed in the Singleton/Jackson film. Singleton is a valuable director and Jackson is deservedly a marquee actor, but this project wasn't especially enjoyable, especially based on the pedigree of the concept. The script just wasn't there. Maybe the paper script had more depth, but on-screen, there wasn't a compelling main villain in Christian Bale's bigoted trust-funder. Jeffrey Wright's Dominican drug dealer stole the show in comparison.Jackson's Shaft is robbed of the relative independence that his predecessor enjoyed in the previous Shaft films. Mainly, Jackson's Shaft starts off the film as a New York City police detective, who quits the force halfway through the film to be a vigilante after being frustrated with how the court systems deals with Bale's criminal blue-blood.Another aspect that can't be ignored here: The film has a literal throwaway non-dialogue credits scene where Shaft throws a candy bar at a woman he just slept with, and along with a provocative line said to a woman at a bar, that's pretty much it for the Bond-esque ladies' man quality that the first Shaft displayed.This was another reason that Jackson's casting doesn't work, because it kind of assumes up-front that this character is not going to be portrayed as any kind of sex symbol, compared to a Wesley Snipes or Will Smith (or whoever else might have been in the running circa 1999-2000.) Jackson's Shaft has a chaste relationship with a fellow detective played by Vanessa L. Williams, but that's it.About the only other part this viewer enjoyed was Richard Roundtree as the "real" Uncle Shaft showing up in key moments. (It is observed that because the age difference between Roundtree and Jackson isn't that dramatic, the character is "Uncle" Shaft rather that his dad.John Shaft's original screen adventures (the first, directed by Gordon Parks) were imbued with the evolving social politics of urban American in the early 1970s. In the first film, Shaft was caught in between the criminal underworld of NY (Bumpy's Harlem operation and the white Mafia), the police, and the activist militants of the neighborhood. Shaft would navigate dealing with all of those elements, but refused to be co-opted by any of them.This "Shaft" film is a competently shot, competently acted, by-the-books actioner, but it just doesn't have a satisfying narrative for repeat viewing. Stick with the originals.

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