Shaft Review

Jeffrey Wright walks off with this one before it has decided what it wants to be. His Peoples Hernandez, a Dominican dealer with a wounded ego and a voice pitched somewhere near a whine, is funnier and more dangerous than anything the script hands Samuel L. Jackson. Jackson is all surface cool, which suits the part, and John Singleton shoots New York in hard winter light with a real feel for cramped bars and precinct corridors.

The trouble is the story. Walter Wade Jr., played by Christian Bale as a rich boy who cannot believe consequences apply to him, is a good villain in theory, but the film keeps parking him in holding cells and letting the plot idle until Wright turns up again. Richard Price worked on the screenplay and you can hear him in individual lines, yet the structure is a muddle of witnesses, bail hearings and dropped subplots.

Toni Collette is wasted entirely as the frightened waitress who saw everything. The Isaac Hayes theme still does more heavy lifting than the direction, and the closing scene, which settles the case with a bullet fired from off screen, plays as a shrug rather than an argument.