Here's That Comedic Shaft Reboot You Wanted: Can Ya Dig It?

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Who’s the cat that won’t come back, unless a comedic tone is where it’s at? Shaft! Can ya’ dig it?

For anyone who missed Black Dynamite, New Line Cinemas are about to turn their reboot of the ‘private dick who’s a sex machine with all the chicks’ into a movie with ‘a comedic tone but will retain its action roots'.

New Line have hired Black-ish creator Kenya Barris and Alex Barnow to write the screenplay for the movie, which will be produced by John Davis and Ira Napoliello. Although details are sparse we can’t imagine a potential franchise will go to quite the genre aping effects of Black Dynamite nor the ‘oh behave!’ tongue in cheek tone of Austin Powers. What seems more likely is a cut and dry buddy cop movie – which is a shame as the original novel by Ernest Tidyman is overdue a straightforward gritty adaptation.

One writer who’s already mined a rich vein of drama from a grittier Shaft is comic book writer and filmmaker David F. Walker; the writer of Dynamite Entertainment’s recent Shaft comic. Walker has already called out the filmmakers on this new ‘comedic tone’, writing an open letter to New Line cinema accused them of rather ‘shitting the bed than making a good Shaft movie’.

“Don’t make this a comedy. It will suck.” Walker says. “It won’t make money. And in doing so, it will ruin the chances of there ever being a decent Shaft movie in the remainder of my lifetime.”

The whole letter is well worth reading and clearly lays down not just the wrong-headedness of the decision but the lack of financial returns such a movie would reap – after all Black Dynamite, a movie which has already been there and done that, made less than one million dollars at the box office.

This isn’t the first attempt to update Shaft with a variant, wayward tone. John Singleton’s 2000 Shaft movie – which saw Samuel L. Jackson play the nephew of the original Shaft – was an unsatisfying mixture of both a lighter, knowing tone and a grittier, urban thriller (the film was written by Clockers scribe Richard Price after all). At best, Singleton’s movie teased us with cast members of The Wire and a much better movie lying frustratingly out of reach.

There’s still no news yet as to who will don the leather jacket of Shaft nor when the movie will appear.

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