Shaft 2019 Review

Who's the man with a five film series spanning thirty years and one of those is a reboot SHAFT your damn right. Yeah guys I do realise that that opening joke isn't that good but believe you and me I tried to make it work and that was the closet I could get to actually making it funny and from that statement you can guess what film i'm reviewing so here is my review of Shaft not to be confused with the 2000 film Shaft or the 1971 film Shaft.

The plot of the movie is JJ is the son of the Shaft from the 2000 film and his best friend is killed and he hires his dad to help him solve the case and along the way they run into his granddad the original Shaft. In terms of what I thought about the story it's very basic and I mean very basic all you get is the bare bones for the set up and that's it I honestly would have loved it if there was a bit more going on but there really isn't altho there is a subplot about 2000 Shaft trying to connect with his son.

  

Returning in this film is Samuel L. Jackson as John Shaft Jr, and Richard Roundtree as John Shaft and they are joined by Jessie Usher as John "JJ" Shaft III , Alexandra Shipp as Sasha Arias , Regina Hall as Maya Babanikos , Matt Lauria as Major Gary Cutworth , Titus Welliver as Special Agent Vietti , Method Man as Freddie P , Avan Jogia as Karim Hassan , Robbie Jones as Sergeant Keith Williams and Lauren Vélez as Bennie Rodriguez.

I'm not going to give anything away here but if your going into this film expecting Richard Roundtree to be in alot of this film then get ready to be disappointing. That said tho during the very limited time he's on screen he is fun to watch and since he's such a legend when it comes to this franchise i'm shocked they didn't have him in it more. As for the rest of the actors Sam Jackson is a joy to watch as usual and the rest of the cast try there best with what there given but sadly there not given much to work with.

I don't know why but it seems to be a trend in Hollywood to give movies the same title as previous movies in the same franchise  we have three movies with the Halloween title , two with the Ghostbusters title , two with the Aladdin name and many more. Honestly is that hard for movie studios to come up with original names we now have three movies with the name Shaft which now means people are going to have to find ways letting people know which Shaft movie they mean.

I've seen a few films over the past few weeks which have lines in them which seem to push an agenda and i'm glad to say that this film isn't one of them. Thank god for that the makers of this film knew not to that and while it didn't result in a better movie it did result in me breathing a sigh of relief because I was getting fed up of seeing films from major studios have lines in them which suggest there pushing some sort of agenda.

It's that lack of agenda pushing which has also got alot of critics pretty angry with Peter Travers from Rolling Stone saying "Tim Story's update of the blaxploitation classic is shamelessly regressive. Male dinosaurs again walk the earth with misogynistic and homophobic impunity. These are the laughs, folks. Don't be surprised if they stick in your throat." and Twitter user Rendy Jones saying in a long thread which i'm not going to post "#SHAFT (2019) is undoubtedly one of the most problematic and worst ever reboots to have ever existed in film. It’s extremely sexist, racist, homophobic, and boasts a toxic masculine tone that goes both unpunished and rewarded." 

I have a feeling that if this film did push an agenda it would still make these guys angry because they'll just look for something else in the film to be mad about instead of just enjoying it. I get why Peter is angry because he grew up with the films so it would make sense but to say it's misogynistic and homophobic is stupid because then you'd be ignoring things from the originals which i've not seen by the way but given the time they were made and genre it's a safe bet to say that those were present in the film.

I think it's safe for you guys to work out from this review that I myself am very mixed about the film and that's because for everything I liked about the film I found several things that I didn't like. One of which was the genre the previous films have been blaxploitation and and a thriller respectively and yet for some reason they chose to make this an R rated action comedy to me that's not a good idea because it's not the type of genre that would work with this character.

Again this isn't a spoiler but they don't play the Shaft theme in this at all which to me is really odd because there are several shots and moments where the theme would have been perfect but they choose not to use it at all. In terms of the jokes I wouldn't say there are that many funny ones there are one or two jokes in here which did get me laughing but the overall majority just didn't and that's not what you want for an action comedy.

As for the action scenes in my opinion they are when the movie is it's most fun to watch and to em that's a good thing because an action sequence should be fun. I will also admit that just because they made the movie fun it doesn't mean that I liked them tho because some of them just came out of know where and added nothing and I think they were only added so they could get a few more shot of people swearing so that r rating is justified but it doesn't work.

Overall this isn't that good of a movie but it's easily better then both Men In Black: International and Dark Phoenix but that's not saying much so this movie gets a 5 out of 10 from me it's harmless fun but it's still a pretty bad movie. This is the last post your going to see from me for a few days as i'm going on holiday and just won't have the time to write anything but i'll see you all again by Saturday or Sunday.