Word: shaft
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Jeffrey Wright makes quite an entrance in Shaft. He arrives with a phalanx of lackeys and junkyard dogs, an ice pick in his pocket and a trash-talking mouth aimed point-blank at Samuel L. Jackson. It's the kind of grand, self-important entrance you haven't seen since Liberace stopped making TV specials. And for the rest of the movie, Wright lives up to that moment with his broadly drawn, carefully shaded performance as Peoples Hernandez, a drug kingpin and the first great movie villain of this millennium...
...Tony: True. And I guess there was nothing politically correct about Shaft's pummeling that corner drug dealer. Usually, in movies, you have to see a baddie being really evil onscreen in order to justify a good whupping. But here you're simply told that this guy is a drug dealer and that he's using a 12-year-old to run his errands, and then the next thing Shaft is gleefully beating him into a bloody mess...
...Clothes were weapons for the original Shaft, whose fierce styling created fashion conventions that survived for decades. Despite the Armani imprimatur, though, the new Shaft looks like a catalog shopper. He may have dissed the drug dealer Peoples in his Egyptian cotton as a "cheap knockoff mutha-----" but Shaft's own styling is unlikely to inspire any new look, precisely because its baldheaded, black-polo-neck-and-raincoat look has long since been a mainstay of R&B music videos...
...Tony: And where was the cool car? And why don't you see Shaft's crib? You sort of wonder what this guy does when he gets home, where he lives, what he eats... All of those choices would have been an opportunity for the movie to define an aesthetic, and they just missed...
...Jennifer: Even more important, where was the slamming soundtrack? All those classic blaxploitation movies like "Shaft" and "Superfly" contained songs that can still lift a party today. But this "Shaft" soundtrack was totally forgettable...