“Shaft is not a good movie,” wrote the Hollywood Reporter in 1971, upon the release of Gordon Parks and Richard Roundtree’s seminal classic. “In many ways, it resembles last year’s Cotton Comes to Harlem, which also seemed aimed at black audiences unused to seeing their urban experience portrayed on the screen; and its problems are similar.”

The problems: “It’s a formula picture, and it’s the wrong formula both for its subject and for Parks.”

THR couldn’t have known it then, but Shaft—and Melvin Van Peebles’s markedly more radical Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, released the same year—were only the beginning. Soon there’d be a fully-fledged genre, called blaxploitation, full of mishmashes like these: black heroes in low-rent movies of the kind that had, to that point, only ever cast black actors to play the bad guy.

Now these actors were playing both sides: cops and crooks, enforcers of the law and its powerful adversaries. Their high-kicks and hijinks were as buoyant as the Afros on their heads and smooth as the leather on their backs—to say nothing of the varieties of blaxploitation that had nothing to do with crime, per se, but everything to do with the urban realities of black American life in the ’70s. In 1976, Vincent Canby, of the New York Times, would describe blaxploitation as “those supercharged, bad‐talking, highly romanticized melodramas about Harlem superstuds, the pimps, the private eyes and the pushers who more or less singlehandedly make whitey’s corrupt world safe for black pimping, black private‐eyeing and black pushing.” That’s one way of putting it.

These were figures with names like Shaft and Coffy and Foxy Brown—figures of the Harlem underworld, in some cases, rogue detectives in others, all of them coming up in worlds full of pimps and hustlers, Black Panthers and other radicals, thwarters of justice and regular black folk trying to get a piece of it. These are movies that would rejigger the old-fashioned street stories that have obsessed Hollywood since at least the days of “Don’t shoot, G-men!” and Eliot Ness, legends that became legends through old newsreels and the fictionalized accounts that followed.

Hence the flaws in that Hollywood Reporter critic’s long-ago logic. Shaft was—still is—a formula picture. But the formula—the detective story—was never a natively white genre, as the reviewer implies. Shaft may have seemed like an awkward variation to someone steeped in stories of white detectives taking the law into their own hands, but that was the point. The terms of the genre were false to begin with. A black detective is no less at home in a movie than a white one, and a Harlem setting is no more alien than Times Square or downtown. It’s all artificial: replacing the old heroes with new ones, especially for the sake of winning over and profiting from a black audience, made sense.

This week sees the release of a new entry in the long-running Shaft franchise, directed by Tim Story (of Barbershop and Kevin Hart’s Ride Along comedies), cowritten by Kenya Barris (Black-ish) and Alex Barnow, and starring Samuel L. Jackson, who took up the franchise’s mantel back in 2000, in a film by the late John Singleton. I cannot speak to the merits of this new entry, which stars Roundtree, Jackson, and Regina Hall and is a lumbering, unfunny, try-hard affair in which almost no one is at their best.

But the mere existence of it is striking. The original Shaft, in which Roundtree made his feature-film debut, was released to mega-success and spurred two sequels, Shaft’s Big Score! (1972) and Shaft in Africa (1973). A short-lived TV series, also starring Roundtree, began airing in 1973. Singleton revived the franchise at the turn of the 21st century; a new line of comic books followed in 2014. And now here we are: 2019, with a new Shaft movie featuring not one, not two, but three full generations of Shafts, a familial outgrowth not unlike the long tendrils of the franchise itself. This is a film that stars black Hollywood talent with over a century’s worth of industry experience between them, in a black action franchise that’s spanned just under 50 years—a remarkable fact.

We (rightly) complain a lot about franchise fever and the ways it’s overtaken the industry. A Shaft sequel is inevitably part of that; as the movie itself proves, this is as much of a nostalgic ploy as a Disney live-action remake. But the history is of course incomparable. For Hollywood, Shaft was the beginning of a trend: a key touchstone in what we now recognize as an ongoing battle, among major studios, to try to tap into a black market. It was one of the first times a studio as major as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer actively sought to court black audiences with the kind of B-movie fare that had by that point helped to sustain the studio system for decades, but it didn’t start out that way; mind-bogglingly enough, MGM originally intended the first Shaft—originally conceived by and based on a novel by former journalist Ernest Tidyman, who would later write The French Connection and Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter—to feature white stars.

Gordon Parks, by then already a legendary photographer, brought his sharp eye to what he knew didn’t amount to much more than a laid-back, groovy piece of entertainment. And soon, Roundtree’s John Shaft—abetted by the Oscar-winning stylings of soul-music laureate Isaac Hayes—strode into movie history as a man caught between two worlds: an active thorn in the side of both the cops (particularly Lieutenant Vic Androzzi, played with a welcome dash of spice by Charles Cioffi) and the black criminal underworld. When the daughter of notorious hustler Bumpy Jonas (Moses Gunn) goes missing, Jonas hires Shaft to find her because of his connections in the “white world,” among other things. He’s also just a dependable private eye.

It’s a cockamamie plot, when you think about it: a renegade black detective and a team of black radicals working together to save a black hustler’s daughter, who’s been kidnapped by the mafia. A bingo board of ’70s New York tropes, and an ideal launching pad for the complexly motivated action hero Shaft would become. He’s a vision of black masculinity: professionally skilled, certain to get laid, willing to stand up to whites and up for blacks, but without any long-standing ties dragging him down. He’s of the law, but also above it. Legitimate, but not a sucker or a sellout—not “the man.”

As a man who can travel between the black underworld and the world of white police, he would seem to typify what we think of as code switching—adjusting himself and performing to the norms of his context, fitting in any and everywhere. But Shaft is, of course, most memorable for doing the opposite. He talks the same way to everybody: cops, crooks, Black Power activists, women. Okay—maybe he’s smoother with women.

What the new Shaft movie doesn’t have, aside from raw gumption or style, is a context that makes it seem urgent. Roundtree’s original performance was, alongside the other icons of blaxploitation, foundational. Black roles constantly call back to it; black action heroes are forever indebted to it. Maybe it’s a good thing that we’re so deep into the franchise, so deep into both the careers of Roundtree and Jackson, that a film like this new iteration can’t help but feel less urgent, or differently urgent.

We still need more studio movies targeting black and other minority markets; Hollywood still hasn’t mastered that trick. But maybe it’s a good sign that a film like the new Shaft can only continue a well-trod tradition: it can get away with a relative lack of ambition. We’ve reached a point in movie history when a film like this can feel nakedly been there, done that: We’ve seen that many derivatives, that many black stories. Maybe that, in the scheme of things, is a good thing.

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