- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
88With Jackson leading the way, Shaft has style, punch, and street cred. It's a hot cool update.
-
75The 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.
-
75Violent, cool and street-smart, Shaft supplies everything you want in a summer movie.
-
75Shaft is what summer action flicks should be... thanks to superior writing, acting and direction.
-
75Shaft is still enormously involving. It's popcorn, but very fresh.
-
75Shaft has everything --smart writing, shrewd direction and a handful of performances that are first-rate by any standard.
-
75It's fast, easy on the eyes, full of funny putdowns and cast well enough to have two memorable villains.
-
75There'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.
-
75If nothing else, Shaft is spicy fast food.
-
70Samuel L. Jackson instantly takes the mantle from Mr. Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree, and runs with it on pure style and charisma.
-
67Essentially works, even though the script is a mess and John Singleton's direction is often clumsy and heavy-handed to an annoying degree.
-
63Is 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.
-
63It'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.
-
63The 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.
-
60It's a bad sign when audience enthusiasm peaks during the credits sequence.
-
60Lean, fast and undeniably entertaining.
-
60Shaft scores by lacing ba-da-boom action with social pertinence.
-
60Singleton's lack of influence makes Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" look far funkier in comparison.
-
54This avenging cat gets no action whatsoever. Neither does the movie, despite a terrific cast and a heap of street style.
-
50The 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.
-
50(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.
-
50As an action flick, Shaft is clumsy out of the gate and overfond of hurtling stuntmen through windows.
-
50The movie itself gets scattered.
-
50Shaft is a decent popcorn movie and Jackson rises to the responsibility of appearing bigger than life.
-
50Shaft? Not in this splashy-but-empty remake he isn't.
-
40The 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.
-
40A pretty good action flick -- twisty, marvelously acted, and energetically (if not always coherently) staged.
-
40As an action thriller with music by Isaac Hayes it's not bad.
-
30This 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.
-
30This is not necessarily an improvement, but it's not a total disaster either.
-
25The 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.
-
20What 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.
-
20Singleton's version is cynical and silly--one long set-up to a closing scene that promises, or threatens, a sequel.
prev
next
Page:
- 1
There are no user reviews yet.