Shaft (2019)

The 2019 Shaft arrives as the fifth entry in a franchise that has now outlived several of its own premises. Tim Story directs a multi-generational comedy in which Samuel L. Jackson's private investigator reunites with the son he abandoned, a cyber security analyst played by Jessie T. Usher, and eventually with Richard Roundtree's original John Shaft, who turns out to be the grandfather rather than the uncle. The plot concerns a murdered friend, a heroin ring, and a mosque used as a laundering front. It is a drug-ring revenge picture wearing a family-reunion suit.

On the matter of representation, the film is Black-led by inheritance. A Black franchise with a Black cast and a Black director is not a statement in 2019; it is simply the property continuing. The supporting ensemble includes a Latina doctor and a Muslim veteran, both present without ceremony. That registers as texture, not thesis. The women here, Regina Hall's Maya and Alexandra Shipp's Dr. Arias, hold professional ground, but the movie has no interest in arguing anything about them. It is a buddy action comedy, and its ambitions end at the next punchline.

Where the film might have lectured, it jokes instead. The humor is broad, often crude, and critics found it uncomfortably outdated, which is a different charge than preachy. There is no climate sermon, no wealth critique (the villains are drug lords and a money launderer, not a hedge fund), no body positivity, no neurodivergent arc, no historical revision. The movie simply wants to put three generations of Shafts on a sidewalk and let them strut. Audiences gave it an A. Critics gave it a shrug. Both responses are defensible.