Shaft, the 1971 original, is a product of its time: a blaxploitation picture with a simple crime story driven by a cheeky lead hero. Shaft, the 2000 remake, is a product of its time: an attempt to shoehorn a diluted version of the brand-cough-character into a competent John Singleton urban crime thriller. Shaft, the 2019 reboot of the series, is a product of its time: shot and edited like a CBS primetime drama with a plot that would fit a 40-minute episode of Hawaii Five-O but stretched out to almost two hours. Thankfully, Shaft 19 (which is what Warner was hoping for, I’m sure) is probably the most successful of the three movies I’ve seen, in nailing the core character in an unoffensive plot that he served instead of domineering or underperforming in.

John Shaft came from the street, and knows the ghetto like the back of his own hand; better then any piece of technology could (though I was a little surprised his office computer was an Apple and not a cheap piece of shit). In Shaft 2000, Sam U L’s Shaft was a specter of the night: a superhero of sorts for Harlem, talked about in whispers and who could appear anywhere at any time. Shaft 19 continues that tradition, with Sam’s Shaft (who returns in a Shaft sandwich between his estranged son Shaft Jr and Roundtree’s Grandpa Shaft) befuddingly showing up at the right place at the right time, every time. But he’s tired: Shaft 19 enjoys playing with Sam’s fish-out-of-water Shaft in a digital world where he has to rely on someone for the first time to solve a case; his son, a FBI analyst who – surprise – has no street smarts, at least on the surface. Needless to say the plot spirals out in a very unoriginal way to where all three men work together (of course) to take down a drug kingpin, played by Isaach de Bankole, who gets to show up and do his intimidating Limits of Control thing before getting shot out a high rise window. I was also happy with how much of Roundtree they used compared to Shaft 2000: further proof that, maybe, Singleton and Jackson’s vision for that movie had less to do with John Shaft and more the cold, hard world of the nineties and naughts in which he lived.

I feel guilty because I enjoyed Shaft 19 so much. It was what my partner refers to as “candy”: the easily-digestible, flavor-of-the-week kind you see so much in today’s youth shows like The Vampire Diaries or The 100. But it stayed true to the traits that make Shaft, Shaft, from the seventies til now, while not only refining the character himself but the kind of movie that he occupies. What you are left with is, as I’ve pointed out, a product of its time: our time. A derivative paint-by-numbers plot with an unoriginal, back-talking foul-mouthed hero with just enough of its tongue in-cheek to be worth its weight in gold.