Who’s the cat that won’t cop out, when there’s danger all about? Shaft, Shaft, and – you guessed it – Shaft. Yes, the new Shaft (Shaft!) is bringing together three generations of the legendary blaxploitation saga, teaming Samuel L. Jackson’s John Shaft II (from 2000’s Shaft) with his son John Shaft III, and Richard Roundtree’s original John Shaft (from 1971’s Shaft), in 2019’s Shaft. (Shaft!) Watch the trio unite in the first trailer, packed with funk riffs (now with added trap beats), shotgun-cocking, and intergenerational squabbling.
While this marks the third rebooting of the Shaft series (Shaft!), all of the films take place in the same continuity – Jackson’s Shaft is the nephew of Roundtree’s Shaft, hence them all sharing the screen in the film that nobody is calling the Infinity War of Shaft movies. The new, youngest Shaft, played by Jessie Usher, is an FBI analyst with knowledge of cybersecurity (Shaft!) investigating the mysterious death of his best friend in the Harlem underworld.
The film comes from director Tim Story, behind the Ride Along films and Barbershop (Shaft!) and is written by Kenya Barris and Alex Barnow. Away from the trio of Shafts, the cast includes the likes of Regina Hall, Alexandra Shipp, and Wu-Tang Clan’s Method Man. It’s coming to cinemas in America on 14 June – and we’ll be getting it on Netflix on the same date.
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