Spoilers herein.
Warning! This film actually contains this dialog at the predictable end: `This is between you and me, let her go...mano et mano, let's go.' This film also has the excecrable acting of Vanessa Williams. That might be all you need to know.
For a film to be good for me, it should transport me to a place that stretches my mind. I had high hopes for `Shaft;' it has a relatively intelligent director, several competent actors, and enough money to do what they want. It builds on a recognized, presumably accomplished Black art. The stretch for my mind would be to enter a world of Black style, communication, semiosis. In other words, because these people are genuine, I was expecting something culturally genuine instead of the slick packaging one gets from the hiphop fashion and record businesses.
I was looking for style and intelligence. When I dipped into `Kings of Comedy,' I saw something artificial which will embarrass us all some day for laughing at it. Sadly, `Shaft,' is just the same old Hollywood drek with the thinnest of Black wrapping. There is a plot line that involves a racist, privileged killer, but in action films, the plot doesn't matter, only the style. And here there is no distinctive style, except the brief scene where Peoples (Jeffrey Wright, last seen as the gravedigger) first walks out of the building. And that's thin stuff. We've lost Singleton. Who's left? Forest Whitaker? Certainly there are a few interesting notions of Black cinematic vocabulary out there waiting to be lived.
Warning! This film actually contains this dialog at the predictable end: `This is between you and me, let her go...mano et mano, let's go.' This film also has the excecrable acting of Vanessa Williams. That might be all you need to know.
For a film to be good for me, it should transport me to a place that stretches my mind. I had high hopes for `Shaft;' it has a relatively intelligent director, several competent actors, and enough money to do what they want. It builds on a recognized, presumably accomplished Black art. The stretch for my mind would be to enter a world of Black style, communication, semiosis. In other words, because these people are genuine, I was expecting something culturally genuine instead of the slick packaging one gets from the hiphop fashion and record businesses.
I was looking for style and intelligence. When I dipped into `Kings of Comedy,' I saw something artificial which will embarrass us all some day for laughing at it. Sadly, `Shaft,' is just the same old Hollywood drek with the thinnest of Black wrapping. There is a plot line that involves a racist, privileged killer, but in action films, the plot doesn't matter, only the style. And here there is no distinctive style, except the brief scene where Peoples (Jeffrey Wright, last seen as the gravedigger) first walks out of the building. And that's thin stuff. We've lost Singleton. Who's left? Forest Whitaker? Certainly there are a few interesting notions of Black cinematic vocabulary out there waiting to be lived.