30
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
This may be the first movie that runs under two hours and yet has no attention span. Characters are abandoned and picked up; narrative threads dissolve before your very eyes.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
75
There's good trash: throwaway, intellectually undemanding action movies that, despite their heavy body counts and hard edges, are executed with a touch of class and a sunny disposition.
75
Philadelphia Inquirer by Carrie Rickey
Shaft is still enormously involving. It's popcorn, but very fresh.
40
Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan
The main thing the new Shaft gets right is casting for the title role. It's too bad the rest of the film doesn't hold your attention the way he does.
60
TV Guide Magazine by Maitland McDonagh
It's a bad sign when audience enthusiasm peaks during the credits sequence.
60
Rolling Stone by Peter Travers
Shaft scores by lacing ba-da-boom action with social pertinence.
70
Samuel L. Jackson instantly takes the mantle from Mr. Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree, and runs with it on pure style and charisma.
60
TNT RoughCut by Susannah Breslin
Singleton's lack of influence makes Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" look far funkier in comparison.
63
San Francisco Examiner by Wesley Morris
The movie's primary narrative weakness is that its racism plot points seem ripped from the headlines of a "Geraldo" newsletter and stretched into a string of terribly executed car chases.
67
Seattle Post-Intelligencer by William Arnold
Essentially works, even though the script is a mess and John Singleton's direction is often clumsy and heavy-handed to an annoying degree.