In Hollywood, everything old is new again. As much as we whine and cry and gnash our teeth, intellectual property is king, simply because it's there, available to be rebooted, rehashed, reheated.
Case in point: "Shaft." Remember the 1971 original? How about the 2000 reboot? And are you ready for the 2019 version, which is pretty much the same except it has more hacky jokes about millennials and an incredibly ugly homophobic streak? Ultracool New York City detective John Shaft is back again with a modern update that goes completely sideways in all the wrong ways. This Shaft is a bad mother all right, and it'd be better if he just shut his mouth.
Samuel L. Jackson reprises his role from the 2000 film as the school-of-hard-knocks detective. Jessie T. Usher (TV's "The Boys") plays the nerdy, college-educated JJ Shaft. (Don't worry, fans of the first "Shaft." Richard Roundtree, playing John Shaft Sr., also shows up eventually.)
The movie was written by Kenya Barris and Andrew Barnow, whose backgrounds are in TV sitcoms ("Black-ish" for Barris and "The Goldbergs" for Barnow). The plot seems like merely a second thought and almost completely unnecessary.
Much of the exposition is dispatched with long reams of dialogue during scenes wherein a random comedic sidebar distracts from any pertinent information. How are we supposed to understand the explanation of the intricate workings of a drug trafficking ring that may or may not have anything to do with a local mosque or an advocacy group for veterans when there's all these corny Uber jokes in the mix?
Yet this distracting material is far preferred to the film's other brand of humor, which is wildly homophobic and misogynistic. Barris and Barnow have tried to glean some jokes from the generational differences between the Shafts, but every cheap jab at metrosexual millennials comes off as mean-spirited, dripping in the kind of toxic masculinity that JJ's generation has been trying to throw off.
The too-little-too-late lessons in manhood from his father consist of sexually objectifying women, and even worse, sexually objectifying firepower. There's a restaurant shootout that features JJ's crush Sasha (Alexandra Shipp) salivating at the sight of him taking up arms. It's grossly fetishistic. And it's particularly troubling given the public health epidemic of gun violence gripping our nation.
With its nasty attitude and haphazard, tonally inconsistent direction by Tim Story ("Ride Along" and its sequel), there isn't much "Shaft" can do to win audiences over. A last-minute appearance by the charismatic Roundtree reminds us why the character has been so appealing for so long. But it just makes us wish we were watching Roundtree's original films, which got away with taboo material because of the era.
If this minor effort proves anything, it's that blindly grafting the ethos of "Shaft" directly onto a modern story without any self-reflection simply doesn't cut it. Can ya dig that?
