After watching Shaft to start this series back in January, I got the idea it might be nice to bookend the series with Shaft movies, meaning I could finish in December with the second sequel Richard Roundtree made to the original film, though there was also a short-lived TV series (seven episodes).
Then for a while I thought it would be better if I did not revisit too much similar material or too many actors who popped up in too many of the same movies.
But by the time I had watched my third movie in the series starring Pam Grier, I decided that there was not really any reason to avoid doubling up, and Shaft in Africa was back on for the month of Christmas, to tie a bow on the series, as it were.
(Quick note: I have only just now realized that in watching Shaft in Africa, I skipped over the first sequel, Shaft's Big Score. I don't know how I missed that that movie was a thing, but it's too late now to go back and do anything about it.)
Having watched the film, I find it hard to believe it was the last movie starring John Shaft until the character was rebooted in 2000 in the person of Samuel L. Jackson. This is a pretty successful third entry, and they were clearly setting him up to be a James Bond-like figure who could continue to appear in movies as long as the audience was willing to continue forking over their hard-earned dollars. (Which they weren't; this movie flopped.)
How do I know this was the intention? Well, early on in the film, there's a scene where Roundtree's Shaft is meeting with some kind of gadget guy, and he actually says he's no James Bond. Bond himself had only been around a little more than ten years at that point, but they were a busy ten years, featuring three different actors stepping into the role, including the debut of Roger Moore that very year (1973).
Before we go on, can I pause a minute to talk about what kind of year 1973, the year of my birth, was for blaxploitation? I've mentioned it before in this series, but now that we've reached the end, I can give you an actual percentage of the films I watched for Blaxploitaudient that were released in 1973. And that percentage is 42. That's right, it was five out of the 12. In the order that I watched them: Cleopatra Jones, Black Mama White Mama, Ganja & Hess, Coffy and Shaft in Africa. Because I didn't watch Cleopatra Jones until July, that means that I watched zero 1973 movies in the first half of the series and then five of the last six. Sometimes it just works out that way.
So back to this film's ultimate failure, which led to the launch of the TV show, which was also a failure. Was James Bond the wrong way to go? How James Bond is this, really?
Here are the things John Shaft does in this movie that make him like James Bond, even beyond the gadget scene where Bond is name-checked:
- Travel to multiple continents, not just Africa (the film finishes in Paris);
- Bed multiple women, one of whom is killed (not by Shaft) shortly after their bedding;
- Make various Bond-like quips both to women and villains;
- Evade torture initiated by very Bond-like villains;
- Confuse me on what's actually going on in the plot.
Yes, on that last front, I didn't fully understand what was happening at any given point in Shaft in Africa, though this is typical for me in a spy movie, and I usually just go with the flow. Which worked out fine here. Instead I focused on the glorious use of Africa in this film -- all those scenes were actually shot in Ethiopia -- and details like Shaft bedding a woman in a raised thatch hut, and doing battle with adversaries with wooden sticks. Shaft does get his gun back, but in a number of scenes he doesn't have one, and I thought that was a good way of switching things up and forcing him to rely on his ingenuity.
The plot itself? Shaft is trying to break up some sort of illegal slave trade operation run by a very Euro baddie. Beyond that it may not be important.
In conclusion, this was an enjoyable way to end the series, and I found that Richard Roundtree's charisma -- already high in the previous movie I saw -- just gets better and better as he goes, and he's fully in sync with the intended tone of the film. I'm sorry it was not a hit, as it would seem likely that the target audience would have enjoyed an African excursion. Maybe they too were confused by the plot.
Shaft in Africa ends things with a rating of 3.5 stars, which is very typical of the films I watched this year. Three received higher than that (each of which got 4 stars) and only one received lower than 3 (which was 2.5). So I think my takeaway is that while these films were and are historically important, none of them were what I would consider a brilliant film -- but also none of them were disasters. Ganja & Hess, Coffy and Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song all showed flashes of brilliance, but were overall very good, not great. Those are the ones I might revisit in the future, at which point, maybe I will decide they are great. And then films like Car Wash and the Shaft movies were just a lot of fun.
Okay, that's a wrap on Blaxploitaudient. Sometime after the start of the new year, I will tell you about the monthly series I have in store for 2025.
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