An average movie

After watching the more recent versions (from 2000 and 2019), I finally had the opportunity to watch the original thing after all these years. Well, this movie is considered as a classic in the Blaxploitation genre but, to be honest, I’m not really familiar with this genre at all (In fact, I would love to see some of the movies Pam Grier made at the time). Anyway, it was pretty cool to see the most famous movie in this genre but, to be honest, I wasn’t really impressed after all. I mean, I really liked the character, Shaft was so cool and charismatic and Richard Roundtree really nailed it. The mood was also neat with this legendary soundtrack by Isaac Hayes. It was basically a classic neo-noir movie with a private detective and the idea of making this private detective a cool black dude was really neat. Unfortunately, even though the concept did have some potential, I’m afraid the movie didn’t have much to offer after all though. Eventually, I get that it was probably made with a shoe-string budget (it certainly look like it, hell, even Shaft himself didn’t have his own car) but it was pretty obvious that it was a cheap movie and, to be honest, nothing much happened through the whole duration after all. Seriously, I think a third of the running time was just Shaft walking up and down the streets of New York looking for some random dudes. I thought it was also narratively rather clunky sometimes. For example, the way Bumpy Jonas approached Shaft to ask him to work for him was just too convoluted for no good reason. Eventually, the most interesting thing about this movie was not the movie itself but the historical impact it had when it was released. Indeed, it was the first time that a black man was portrayed this way and the fact that it was a big box-office success at the time displayed that there was clearly a demand/need for that. About 50 years later, there would be a similar phenomenon with ‘Black Panther’ which was the first black blockbuster and a massive box-office success. Both movies displayed how important representation is in the movies and that we still have a lot of work to do in this area. Anyway, to conclude, even though this movie didn’t really blow me away, I still think it is worth a look, if only for its historical value. 

6/10