Cinema: Has Shaft Been Shafted?

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The new Shaft, played by Samuel L. Jackson, is different from the old one, portrayed in the '70s by Richard Roundtree, in two significant ways. He is no longer a private eye--if you can believe it, he's now a New York City cop--and though plenty of foxy chicks sashay across his eyeline, his interest is mainly in chatting them up, not in bedding them down.

This is not necessarily an improvement, but it's not a total disaster either. Jackson is as fast with a contemptuous quip as he is with his fists; and if he is not quite the cool sexual outlaw that his predecessor was, that's all right too, since "blaxploitation" was never more than a passing fad--a more or less genial way of asserting black studdishness while giving white liberals the jimjams.

But it at least had an attitude, and that's what director John Singleton's Shaft lacks. It begins by focusing on an upper-class racist murderer (Christian Bale) whose motives we don't quite believe. So the movie quickly shifts its attention to a sly, brutal, self-regarding Latino drug dealer (Jeffrey Wright). You can understand only about one in three words he speaks, but you catch his very scary drift.

Wright's a wonder, playing a role that was--deservedly--built up during production. But that leaves a lot of other actors--among them Vanessa Williams, Toni Collette and Roundtree himself (as Shaft's beamish uncle)--shortchanged. It also leaves Jackson to play yet another cop rebelliously disgusted with the system and Singleton with yet another urban action piece, well enough made but not essentially different from a hundred other movies just like it.

--By Richard Schickel