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Shaft

Mixed or average reviews
Based on 33 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 3 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Crime
Written by:
Ernest Tidyman (novel)
John Singleton (also story)
Shane Salerno (also story)
Richard Price
Directed by: John Singleton
Release Date:
Theatrical: June 16, 2000
DVD: December 12, 2000
Running Time: 99 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for strong violence and language
Starring Samuel L. Jackson, Vanessa L. Williams, and Jeffrey Wright
A murderer tries to kill the only witness to his last crime. Shaft (Jackson) and his sidekick (Williams) are trying to catch the murderer.
Also On Metacritic
FILM: 2 Fast 2 Furious Baby Boy Boyz N the Hood Four Brothers Higher Learning Poetic Justice Rosewood
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Boston Globe Jay Carr
With Jackson leading the way, Shaft has style, punch, and street cred. It's a hot cool update.
Read Full Review >New York Post Jonathan Foreman
Shaft is what summer action flicks should be... thanks to superior writing, acting and direction.
Read Full Review >USA Today Mike Clark
It's fast, easy on the eyes, full of funny putdowns and cast well enough to have two memorable villains.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
Shaft has everything --smart writing, shrewd direction and a handful of performances that are first-rate by any standard.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jami Bernard
Violent, cool and street-smart, Shaft supplies everything you want in a summer movie.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Ann Hornaday
There's good trash: throwaway, intellectually undemanding action movies that, despite their heavy body counts and hard edges, are executed with a touch of class and a sunny disposition.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
Shaft is still enormously involving. It's popcorn, but very fresh.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
The new movie, like its predecessor, is a crime thriller with a moral viewpoint, an eye and ear for street color and a taste for macho movie fantasy.
Read Full Review >Variety Robert Koehler
Samuel L. Jackson instantly takes the mantle from Mr. Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree, and runs with it on pure style and charisma.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
Essentially works, even though the script is a mess and John Singleton's direction is often clumsy and heavy-handed to an annoying degree.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Examiner Wesley Morris
The movie's primary narrative weakness is that its racism plot points seem ripped from the headlines of a "Geraldo" newsletter and stretched into a string of terribly executed car chases.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Phoebe Flowers
It's not easy to forgive a movie that so ungratefully wastes its potential with such a poorly structured plot, but Shaft has a few redeeming moments up its sleeve after all.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Is this a good movie? Not exactly; too much of it is on automatic pilot, as it must be, to satisfy the fans of the original Shaft. Is it better than I expected? Yes.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
It's a bad sign when audience enthusiasm peaks during the credits sequence.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Shaft scores by lacing ba-da-boom action with social pertinence.
TNT RoughCut Susannah Breslin
Singleton's lack of influence makes Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" look far funkier in comparison.
Read Full Review >Mr. Showbiz Kevin Maynard
This avenging cat gets no action whatsoever. Neither does the movie, despite a terrific cast and a heap of street style.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Rita Kempley
Shaft? Not in this splashy-but-empty remake he isn't.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
As an action flick, Shaft is clumsy out of the gate and overfond of hurtling stuntmen through windows.
Read Full Review >Film.com Tom Keogh
Shaft is a decent popcorn movie and Jackson rises to the responsibility of appearing bigger than life.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
The storyline goes from bad to worse as one-dimensional characters gradually flatten out into pure stick figures, and the crime plot goes from hokey to implausible.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
(If) you're one of those killjoys who demands logic, coherence and a semblance of human life from a movie, this one will leave you cold.
Read Full Review >Slate David Edelstein
A pretty good action flick -- twisty, marvelously acted, and energetically (if not always coherently) staged.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
As an action thriller with music by Isaac Hayes it's not bad.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
The main thing the new Shaft gets right is casting for the title role. It's too bad the rest of the film doesn't hold your attention the way he does.
Read Full Review >The New York Times A.O. Scott
This may be the first movie that runs under two hours and yet has no attention span. Characters are abandoned and picked up; narrative threads dissolve before your very eyes.
Read Full Review >Time Richard Schickel
This is not necessarily an improvement, but it's not a total disaster either.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
The plot is a shameless plea for vigilante violence, and the dignity of the black hero is outweighed by the ethnically marked evil of his Hispanic antagonist. Beneath its crisp veneer, much of the movie is a high-energy hymn to hate.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Manohla Dargis
What Jackson's Shaft can't do is talk the talk, or much of anything else, in director John Singleton's feature-length insult to one of the more cherished modern screen icons.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky
Singleton's version is cynical and silly--one long set-up to a closing scene that promises, or threatens, a sequel.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 7.0 (out of 10) based on 3 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Tarik T. gave it a 10:
This movie is the best movie ever.
Ryan M. gave it a 1:
Awful, graphic and horrible remake by a brilliant director, who in my opinion, completely wasted his time.
