Jackson shifts Shaft forward

Jackson and Toni Collette in the violent Shaft

By BBC News Online's Entertainment Correspondent Tom Brook

Almost 30 years after the original Shaft became a huge hit, an updated version of the action movie, starring Pulp Fiction's Samuel L Jackson, has arrived with considerable fanfare in American cinemas.

The original Shaft, one of the first "blaxploitation" movies, featured Richard Roundtree as an ultra-cool New York private detective and ladykiller.

Wright puts in a strong performance

The new film, from director John Singleton, is quite different from the original but what it does have in common is the world famous Shaft theme song, updated by Isaac Hayes.

Hayes, who is now 57, says that when he first heard of plans to remake the movie he couldn't take the idea seriously. But he was urged by Singleton and eventually agreed to modernise the theme.

But Hayes told Singleton he would only collaborate if he let him "do the theme exactly like it was before, but with today's technology, because you can't reinvent the wheel".

The original Shaft, as portrayed by Richard Roundtree in 1971, was politically astute, well dressed and sexually promiscuous. He was a hero to African-Americans who had long been deprived of charismatic role models in the cinema.

Actress and singer Vanessa Williams also stars

Shaft then was very much a product of the civil rights era. Jackson says in 1971 Shaft was "all about black pride, he was very proud, he had power and ego".

The new Shaft, as embodied by Samuel L Jackson, displays attitude and dress sense. He strides through the mean streets of New York City clad in Armani clothes, coolly negotiating such modern urban realities as police racism, drugs, gangs and vigilante justice.

Jackson explains that he didn't want to impose "hipness" on his character. "Hopefully things happen that turn out to be hip," he says, adding that he wasn't trying to manufacture "a cool moment".

Tension

In the new film, Shaft is on the police force, but he leaves in disgust because an inept criminal-justice system has failed to snare an evil white yuppie racist played by Christian Bale who has killed a young black man.

Bale plays a villain of the piece

Shaft takes the law into his own hands in an effort to bring this privileged yuppie to justice. In his quest he encounters an even bigger villain - a menacing Dominican drug lord called Peoples Hernandez, brilliantly portrayed by American actor Jeffrey Wright who almost steals the movie.

By all accounts, creative tensions became frayed on the set and arguments erupted along racial lines as to how the story should be told.

The film's African-American star and director often found they were often at loggerheads with the producer Scott Rudin and screenwriter Richard Price - both of whom are white.

One of the casualties of the creative disputes is that sex, a very big part of Shaft's mystique in the original is noticeably absent in the remake.

Richard Roundtree who has a small part as Shaft's uncle in the new picture couldn't believe it when he found that virtually all the sex had been taken out.

No sex

He says: "That's where they dropped the ball. I read the script and I thought I was missing something and I went back and I read it again. They're taking political correctness a little far."

Original Shaft Roundtree takes a small part in the remake

Replacing sex in the modern Shaft is violence, and a lot of it. Jackson's Shaft is a gun-toting hero prone to outbursts of lethal violence.

A worrying aspect of the new film is that violence, as represented by the trigger-happy Jackson in his Armani clothing, almost becomes part of a fashion statement.

Paramount Pictures chief Sherry Lansing, whose studio is releasing Shaft has few concerns, she thinks the remake will reach a wide mainstream audience.

She eagerly hypes the film proclaiming: "It's gender blind! It's colour-blind! It's great action and it's great fun!"

As Hollywood entertainment, Shaft works, Samuel L Jackson is extremely powerful and carries a film that certainly bears all the hallmarks of a hit.

There's even talk that this latest picture will launch a new Shaft franchise capable of spawning some lucrative sequels in the next few years.