Secret Movie Confession: I've never seen a blaxploitation film before. Oh dear, I know. I've had Foxy Brown for months and just haven't gotten around to watching it. Instead I decided to give Shaft a try, mainly because it has a cool theme song. The film focuses on the titular private detective (Richard Roundtree) as he tracks down the kidnapped daughter of a Harlem crime boss named Bumpy (Moses Gunn), who's caught up in a war with the mafia. He teams up with black power activist Ben Buford (Christopher St. John), an old friend with a lot of followers. Along the way he has sex with some ladies and argues with the white police investigator who's trying to find the cause of several recent murders uptown.
Most of this movie is just following Shaft around as cool music plays. Sometimes a gun is fired, sometimes he yells at people, sometimes he is romancing a lady who may or may not be his girlfriend. For a story about a PI, there isn't much mystery- we find out pretty quickly who has Bumpy's daughter, and there aren't any weird twists or anything. It tries to be an action movie, but there's a lot of dull space in between the action scenes, and it's all over-directed. I didn't really like the character of Shaft, because he's kind of mean and didn't actually send out the badass vibe everyone around him seemed to get. I thought Moses Gunn and Christopher St. John were the stand-out performances, with the former radiating a sleazy, slow-talking dignity and the latter rocking some killer sideburns, but neither of them were in it very much.
It's kind of boring, it's not very nice to ladies, and the main character isn't interesting enough for me to enjoy watching him walk around for an hour and 40 minutes. Shaft isn't awful, I just didn't see anything special about it. But at least now I've seen it.
3/5
Friday, December 11, 2009
Shaft (1971)
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Yeah, this movie is way overrated. It's this huge build-up to some big confrontation that instead just ends with a like two minute segment of Shaft and co. killing about five clueless Italians despite planning for half an hour about what a bloodbath it was going to be.
ReplyDeleteThe only part I like about it is that absurd bit at the start where they attempted a POV shot of being strangled and the guy clearly grips the rectangular frame of the camera to mime choking Shaft. It was so bad it was good.
Shaft is too slow for its own good, but then again, he threw that flaming newspaper through that window like a fuckin' pro. Best part here is Isaac Hayes.
ReplyDeleteI was SO BORED by Shaft. He spends the movie walking around and sniping at the chief ("Do it yourself... shitty!"). For blaxsploitation, I recommend "TNT Jackson", "Coffy", or ANYTHING with Rudy Ray Moore.
ReplyDeletehaha thanks for the recommendations 24hours! I've seen about 20 minutes of Coffy and would definitely like to see the whole thing.
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