Nine years have passed and Singleton has been making headlines again. Confrontations on the set of his latest production, Shaft , have been as racially charged as the film itself. Star, Samuel L Jackson, has allegedly refused to utter the white man s lines of the script and Singleton has been in conflict with producer Scott Rudin. Eschewing the depth of his earlier work, Singleton s Shaft readily conforms to the specs of an action blockbuster with little credible comment to make.
Shaft s a tough, bad-ass cop who won t stand racism and can t tolerate injustice.
That is, unless he s meting it out. With plenty of spunk, flamboyance and serious attitude, Shaft is undeniably hip. Amid the outrageous invective, Jackson delivers some smooth lines like, It s my duty to please the booty and Too black for the uniform and too blue for the brothers . But this high-gloss upbeat race thriller is hamstrung by superficiality, stereotypes and enough dead bodies to constitute a small war. The plot flaws and clich s are forgivable and the language more or less expected, but the film s endorsement of vigilante violence is disturbing to say the least.