Shaft

Boston Globe Jay Carr

With Jackson leading the way, Shaft has style, punch, and street cred. It's a hot cool update.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

Shaft is what summer action flicks should be... thanks to superior writing, acting and direction.

USA Today Mike Clark

It's fast, easy on the eyes, full of funny putdowns and cast well enough to have two memorable villains.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

If nothing else, Shaft is spicy fast food.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Shaft has everything --smart writing, shrewd direction and a handful of performances that are first-rate by any standard.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

Violent, cool and street-smart, Shaft supplies everything you want in a summer movie.

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.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Shaft is still enormously involving. It's popcorn, but very fresh.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Salon.com Charles Taylor

Lean, fast and undeniably entertaining.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

It's a bad sign when audience enthusiasm peaks during the credits sequence.

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.

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.

Washington Post Rita Kempley

Shaft? Not in this splashy-but-empty remake he isn't.

Film.com Robert Horton

The movie itself gets scattered.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

As an action flick, Shaft is clumsy out of the gate and overfond of hurtling stuntmen through windows.

Film.com Tom Keogh

Shaft is a decent popcorn movie and Jackson rises to the responsibility of appearing bigger than life.

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.

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.

Slate David Edelstein

A pretty good action flick -- twisty, marvelously acted, and energetically (if not always coherently) staged.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

As an action thriller with music by Isaac Hayes it's not bad.

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.

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.

Time Richard Schickel

This is not necessarily an improvement, but it's not a total disaster either.

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.

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.

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.