SOURCE: Flowers, Phoebe. “Shaft Cops Out Patchwork Script.” Miami Herald (16 June 2000): S32.

In the following review, Flowers offers a negative assessment of Shaft.

John Singleton's remake of Shaft casts Samuel L. Jackson, in all his furious glory, as John Shaft, who back in the day was a black private dick doing double duty as a sex machine to all the chicks, but now is just a really, really angry cop with unproven carnal prowess. (Lest there be any confusion, Jackson's John Shaft is not the John Shaft; he's nephew to the character Richard Roundtree made immortal in the 1971 blaxploitation classic.)

It's important to note that the original Shaft, while it has its own impenetrable place in history, wasn't particularly great, or even all that entertaining, save a few indelicate one-liners that still hold up today (Sergeant: “Where are you going?” Shaft: “To get laid; what about you?”). The...