Avis Metacritic

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.

Shaft is still enormously involving. It's popcorn, but very fresh.

Samuel L. Jackson instantly takes the mantle from Mr. Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree, and runs with it on pure style and charisma.

Essentially works, even though the script is a mess and John Singleton's direction is often clumsy and heavy-handed to an annoying degree.

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.

It's a bad sign when audience enthusiasm peaks during the credits sequence.

Shaft scores by lacing ba-da-boom action with social pertinence.

Singleton's lack of influence makes Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" look far funkier in comparison.

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.

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.