Just to be sure: this isn't a remake of Shaft, nor a prequel to the 1970's Shaft, but a different type of Shaft character... he is the nephew of Uncle John Shaft. They share the same first name, but Samuel L. Jackson's Shaft is not his take on the original Shaft character.
Here, John Shaft (Jr) is an NYPD cop who is investigating a racially motivated murder wherein a young Black man named Trey, was fatally killed by a rich White yuppie, Walter Wade Jr., played by Christian Bale (years before he (Bale) took on the mantle of Bruce Wayne & Batman in Christopher Nolan's Batman films). Shaft quits the NYPD and 2 years later, he is now a narcotics cop/agent with leader & partner, Carmen Vasquez (Vanessa L. Williams) at the helm. When Wade gets released years later, he and a Dominican drug lord, Peoples go out of their way to kill the eyewitness, Trey's date, Ivy (Toni Collete).
In John Singleton's original script, Richard Roundtree would have played a more pivotal role, teaming up with a younger, newer generation to fight social and racial injustice. Yet neither the studios nor Shaft's producer agreed. Reportedly, Samuel L.Jackson & Singleton disagreed during the shooting & they had clashed with producer Scott Rudin & screenwriter Richard Price during the filmmaking process.
For someone who never saw the original nor was familiar with the Richard Roundtree-led Blaxploitation hit, John Singleton's Shaft was enjoyable, if not mind-blowing.
I thought the supporting cast did well with the marginally weak script and lent themselves well as their characters: Vanessa L. Williams and Toni Collette were decent, although it was a little odd to see that Williams' character is Latina, and Williams herself is African-American, and Jeffery Wright's surprising turn as the flamboyant Spanish-speaking People's was one of the highlights (I was interested to learn he is part-Latino in real-life), whereas rapper Busta Rhymes, you can either give or take his cameo as Rasaan. Bale's turn as the smug Walter was a follow-up to his breakout role in American Psycho and here, he dials up the nastiness and bravado to a tee.
Yet the film's flaws lie in the lack of character development: the story itself is very routine, one-note and by-the-numbers, which doesn't offer many surprises, but for the two corrupt and not-so-smart cops. It does well with what it has to work with, but this in itself lies in the film biting off more than it can chew.
Final Verdict:
Regardless, that same story was easy to follow all the way through, the casting worked & the team-up of John Singleton and Samuel L. Jackson was interesting. Other than that, as mentioned, I found 2000's Shaft enjoyable, but it didn't offer more for it to deserve a 9 or 10 out of 10 for me.
I just wished the story was a little scrappier and were a bit feistier for an R-rated, 18-rated crime thriller; Shaft plays things all too safe and Singleton allows whatever issues that are supposed to be deep and serious to be resolved, in a very simplistic and watered down way.
It got a mixed reception, yes - subjectively speaking, Shaft isn't great, but I still enjoyed it.
