Shaft’s His Name, but What’s His Game?

Director John Singleton says that films such as “The French Connection,” “Dirty Harry” and “Point Blank” were very much on his mind when he decided to do a “Shaft” remake (“Can You Dig It? Well, Not Quite,” by Eric Harrison, June 23). That explains a lot.

In these films, the deeply flawed heroes operated way outside the law and wreaked their special brand of vigilante mayhem and murder on the streets. Singleton’s Shaft does the same.

But this stands in stark contrast to the original “Shaft.” I saw the film several times. And each time I delighted in Shaft’s defiant sneer, swagger and tough talk. I was thrilled that he could kick plenty white and black butt and get away with it. He was a walking neon sign that flashed, “I’m a strong, proud black man who won’t take any stuff off anyone.” He gave free rein to my he-man, macho fantasies of being tough and self-assertive.

The original Shaft, however, was not mean-spirited or vindictive. While you knew that he would never back down from a fight, he did not go out of his way to pick one either. The black superheroes in the other blaxploitation films pretty much were cut out of the same cloth. They did not kick white butt (or that of other blacks) simply to get back at “whitey.”

They were not self-appointed street avengers who annihilated the law out of sport or anger. They were not obsessed with wreaking their special brand of destructive rage on others. The targets of their wrath were usually mob figures who tried to muscle in on their turf and had put a price on their head. Or they were corrupt and brutal cops.

In the original movie, Shaft was a private detective hired to rescue the daughter of a Harlem mob boss kidnapped by Mafia-type gangsters. Though the bodies quickly piled up along the way, Shaft was not driven by a desire for revenge, a “Death Wish” spirit of vigilantism, or even to collect the bounty. His real motive was to protect the dignity and honor of the black community.

Singleton’s Shaft is driven by a lust for pure, unbridled revenge. He hates the corruption and perceived racial bias of his on-again, off-again (I’m never sure which) bosses in the New York Police Department. The pristine, noble warrior I remembered, admired and identified with has been reincarnated as a hip-talking, Armani-dressed Dirty Harry, hell-bent on a search-and-destroy mission. Each fist in the mouth and bullet in the torso of his prey sends the loud message that the legal system is so hopelessly tainted that the only way to get any justice is to be judge, jury and executioner.

In one particularly odious scene, Shaft pistol-whips a black man and threatens his friends at gunpoint, all on the word of a resident who claims these young men are terrorizing the neighborhood. To drive the point home that vigilantism is OK, two police officers who witness the violence wink and nod and keep driving.

The great danger is that some audience members might be sorely tempted to see this as a green light to translate screen fantasy violence into revenge violence of the street. If that happens, it’s almost certain that the casualties of such violence won’t be murderous cops or bigoted mobsters but the usual innocents.

In recent weeks we’ve seen a reputed gang member charged with gunning down the granddaughter of LAPD Chief Bernard Parks in the course of an alleged revenge attack on another gang member. In Washington, a revenge gang shooting at the National Zoo left one dead and another seriously wounded. In Florida, a 13-year-old student shot his teacher, purportedly to get revenge for a classroom slight.

Equally troubling, the remade Shaft (Samuel L. Jackson) shouts, “It’s Giuliani time.” These supposedly were the code words some New York cops used to signal their intent to bust the heads of young blacks and Latinos. That cry almost certainly conjures up chilling images among many blacks of the deadly cycle of police shootings, physical assaults, racial profiling and other hyper-charged, alleged racially-tainted acts of police misconduct. It also nakedly exploits the cynicism, distrust and volcanic anger of young blacks with the criminal justice system and reinforces their notion that that system is big, mean, violent, corrupt and routinely targets blacks for abuse.

Yes, Jackson’s Shaft is the biggest, baddest black cat on the screen. Now let’s hope that that’s where his badness stays. Can you dig that?