Directrospective: SHAFT (2000)

Notes on the films of American director John Singleton.

Singleton’s 2000 revival of the SHAFT franchise has a lot of problems, this moment not among them.

Gordon Parks’s 1971 film SHAFT fucking rules. It’s exciting, it’s funny, it’s beautifully shot, it’s cool as hell, the Isaac Hayes score is fantastic, the costumes are great, and most importantly it has nuanced things to say about the relationship between race and justice. Richard Roundtree’s private detective John Shaft is contacted by a new client whose teenage daughter has been kidnapped by the Italian mafia. That client turns out to be Harlem crime boss Bumpy Jonas (Moses Gunn). Shaft doesn’t want to work for a criminal, but Jonas begs him - his daughter is an uninvolved kid who doesn’t deserve to be punished for her father’s misdeeds, and he can’t go to the cops because he’s Harlem crime boss Bumpy Jonas. Even if the police did agree to look for his daughter, which they probably wouldn’t, the combination of police racism and incompetence and the deep mistrust they’ve earned from the Black people in Harlem would make her safe return impossible. Shaft is able to rescue Marcy Jonas specifically because he’s not a cop, because his position outside the official criminal justice system allows him to earn the trust of a community which that system harms more than helps. Most importantly it allows him to see past the letter of the law to determine what actual justice looks like for this community. This is not the time to take down Bumpy Jonas’s criminal enterprise, and certainly not the time to worry about the militant Black Panther analogues whom Shaft eventually persuades to help him. This is about saving a young Black life. It’s a story of community self-defense and mutual aid.

That’s a big part of what makes John Singleton’s 2000 sequel/reboot SHAFT so unpalatable. Like the 1971 film, it’s about a Black P.I. named John Shaft (in this case John Shaft II, the Roundtree character’s nephew, played by Samuel L. Jackson) who goes outside the law to do what the police can’t or won’t. But where that film was about the criminal justice system’s inability to protect a Black teenager, the reason Shaft II quits the police force (oh yeah, he’s a cop for the entire first act) is so that he can exact DIRTY HARRY-style extrajudicial revenge on a rich white man who has exploited the system to avoid punishment.

The rich white man in question is Walter Wade, Jr. (Christian Bale), son of a New York real estate tycoon and clear stand-in for Donald Trump, Jr. After throwing some hate speech at Black restaurant patron Trey Howard (Mekhi Phifer) and being verbally humiliated by Trey in return, Wade follows Trey outside and beats him to death. Then he claims he was acting in self-defense. Bartender Diane Palmieri (Toni Collette) saw the whole thing but is too afraid to testify against someone so powerful and connected. In his frustration, Shaft punches a handcuffed Wade, and thanks to his grievous use of force, Wade is granted bail and leaves the country. Two years later, Shaft apprehends Wade and rearrests him only for Wade to make bail once more. Shaft resigns from the force in disgust.

There’s no question that Wade is monstrous or that the system is designed to benefit the wealthy and white. But Shaft doesn’t quit the force because he’s realized it can’t serve the needs of Black New Yorkers. He quits the force because it can’t serve the wants of John Shaft. Just because Wade desperately deserves to be punched in the face doesn’t mean we should root for police brutality. Most cops who assault handcuffed suspects probably think they’re being just as heroic as Shaft does. There are a few surface-level mentions of the relationship between the police and race, but they don’t go any deeper than that. A white cop asks Shaft to pick a color, “black or blue,” and Shaft tells him off. Later, that same white cop graciously teams up with Shaft to dole out some outside-the-law “justice.” They dress up as muggers and rip Wade off so that they can plant Wade’s money on a pair of corrupt cops (Dan Hedaya and Ruben Santiago-Hudson), one white and one black, in a plan to trick their criminal allies into murdering them so Shaft doesn’t have to. A clear distinction is made between Good Guys and Bad Guys, unlike the distinction in the 1971 SHAFT between Justice and what the police call “justice.” Wade himself hires Dominican drug lord Peoples Hernandez (Jeffrey Wright in a totally deranged, possibly legally actionable imitation of John Leguizamo, who dropped out of this to make MOULIN ROUGE), another one of Shaft’s former collars, to send some of his men to kill Diane before she can change her mind about testifying. Wade and Hernandez may be mutually contemptuous of one another, but what their alliance means in practice is that most of the people Shaft ends up shooting - and he ends up shooting a lot of people - are Black and brown members of Hernandez’s organization. It would be gross coming from any filmmaker, but it’s particularly disappointing to see in a film written and directed by the same person who made BOYZ N THE HOOD.

SHAFT occupies a pivotal position in Singleton’s career. It’s the first of two franchise entries he’d direct (he was in talks for a number of others), and it’s the beginning of the popcornier half of his filmography. Most significantly, there’s a substantial change in the volume and type of violence in all but one of the films Singleton would go on to make from here. As I wrote about in my posts on HIGHER LEARNING and ROSEWOOD, the number of shooting deaths in Singleton films had been creeping up, with their individual impact on the story becoming less significant. Where a single gang murder in BOYZ shatters the lives of every character we’ve come to care about, POETIC JUSTICE uses the shooting deaths of undeveloped loved ones as motivations for the main characters’ actions, we learn HIGHER LEARNING’s mass shooting killed an additional person who is never named, and ROSEWOOD has an indeterminate number of Black people murdered by a white mob offscreen. Still, the violence in these films (with the exception of a few of ROSEWOOD’s armed white racists killed in self-defense) is never justified, with the retributive violence against Ricky’s killer in BOYZ depicted as particularly senseless and unhelpful. SHAFT is the first Singleton film in which shooting someone to death is cool. Cool is inherent to the SHAFT franchise - there’s a reason Singleton cast Jackson (he also considered Wesley Snipes and ROSEWOOD’s Don Cheadle, which only proves my point) and costume designer Ruth E. Carter covers the cast in the most leather jackets I’ve ever seen in a single film. To sign on as writer-director of a SHAFT relaunch and not glorify gun violence would be career suicide or an intentional move to get fired as some kind of political statement aimed mostly at readers of The Hollywood Reporter. It’s just really disheartening to see the filmmaker behind several groundbreakingly humane depictions of Black urban life go on to make a popcorn movie about a Black supercop who puts bullets in the heads of two dozen nameless Dominican gangsters. We’re a long way from Officer Coffey in BOYZ N THE HOOD, or maybe not far at all.