Shaft (2000)
Directed by John Singleton
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.
5 connections found
View:
5 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Shaft to
By walking the line between rebellion and justice, Roundtree paved the way for Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson, who's "Dirty Harry" and "Death Wish" movies respectively owed plenty to "Shaft."
Like "Dirty Harry," Jackson's Shaft is an edgy police officer whose social outrage boils below the surface.
The story's broad outlines are familiar not only from early 1970s black exploitation movies, but also from the early " Dirty Harry " pictures, and when a top cop orders Shaft to get out of his precinct, it's like he's reciting dialogue from the classics.
Like the "Dirty Harry" series of movies by Clint Eastwood, this film walks a tightrope between vigilante vengeance and justice under the law.
While blaxploitation movies like "Superfly" and "Foxy Brown" lacked the smooth production values of their contemporaries, they more than made up for it with a confident demeanor that almost went too far.
Adding to the mix are wonderful supporting turns from Til Schweiger (as the German renegade “Shaft” figure of the Basterds) and Daniel Bruhl (playing a Nazi war hero smitten with Shoshanna), cameos from Mike Myers and Rod Taylor, and some vocal surprises provided by Samuel L. Jackson and Harvey Keitel.
With the exception of the Samuel L. Jackson’s remake of Shaft and Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown , very few films in this genre have emerged in the last 30 years.
Advertisement
ALL LIPS AND legs, Angelina Jolie struts through "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" the way Samuel L. Jackson swaggered through "Shaft"-as if nothing in the movie mattered but her own sex appeal.