Grade: B-

Verdict: You can dig enough of it.

Details: Starring Samuel L. Jackson, Christian Bale and Jeffrey Wright. Directed by John Singleton. Rated R for strong violence and profanity. 1 hour, 37 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: The defining moment in "Shaft" - not the 1971 sex-machine version where Richard Roundtree crashes through a window in off-the-rack fly threads, but the new near sexless one where Samuel L. Jackson struts the center line of a busy downtown street clad in an Armani trenchcoat - has to do with instruction.

In full-force new-age Shaftadelic law enforcement, Jackson wades into a pack of laughing street hoods. He grabs the leader by his no-account red clothing, pulls a menacing-looking gun and begins pistol-whipping the punk's face.

Whack! "What's my name?!" Jackson shouts. Whack! "What's my name?!" Whack!

"John Shaft," the hood finally sputters in between spits of blood.

Well, go to the head of the class, my man.

With good - sometimes even remarkable - performances and sporting the fully-intact original Oscar-winning theme song, the 2000 "Shaft" is one bad, at times ultra-violent, I'm-messin'-with-your-head movie. Of course, while playing the original John Shaft's nephew, who's also named John Shaft, Jackson's favorite word to repeat over and over is "mother[shut your mouth]." And Roundtree's extended cameo gives him enough screen time to draw on a cigar, affectionately call a co-worker "dog" and exit stage left with two lucious fur-clad chicks dangling from his arms.

Yes, this is some kind of entertainment.

It's kind of hard to figure out whether you're watching a new film or antique television. Director John Singleton goes for TV's Quinn Martin Productions stamp, harking most every plot twist like he's making a "Barnaby Jones" episode and even marking scene changes with angling film cuts. Burt Reynolds' TV detective Dan August seems as likely to show up onscreen as John Shaft.

The story is also a trumped up trifle. "Shaft" instantly plays a race card, with Jackson investigating a filthy-rich white blowhard (Christian Bale), suspected of hurling hate slurs and then pummeling a black man with a steel pole. There's an eerily uncooperative witness ("The Sixth Sense's" Toni Collette, in a role thoroughly wasting her talent); a rather whacked-out drug lord (Jeffrey Wright); dirty cops; a funny, foul-mouthed driver (Busta Rhymes); a tattooed squealer; and more ammo, it seems, than all three previous "Shaft" flicks put together.

What really clicks are some of the stars.

Bale's white-boy trash is as headstrong as the stalking killer he played so well in "American Psycho." And Jackson percolates much of the power moviegoers have come to expect from one of this country's finest actors.

But while the film does pack a couple of wild plot twists, its biggest surprise is Jeffrey Wright ("Basquiat" and Broadway's "Angels in America"). As Dominican drug lord Peoples Hernandez, he's terrific, strutting an affected walk, wielding a madman's ice pick and effectively stealing the picture.

And that's a hard thing to do when Jackson's shouting, "What's my name?!"

— Bob Longino, Cox News Service