Shaft’s Big Score! (1972)

Directed by Gordon Parks. Starring Richard Roundtree, Joseph Mascolo, Moses Gunn, Wally Taylor, Julius Harris, Drew Bundini Brown, Kathy Imrie, Rosalind Miles, Joe Santos, Robert Kya-Hill. [R]

Satisfactory sequel is slicker but more arduous, an uptick in the budget improving the production values, yet the urgency is more intermittent and its hero a little more generic and superheroic. Shaft (more two-fisted, shotgun-toting man-of-action than private eye) looks into the car-bombing murder of an old friend and gets entangled in a mob war. Roundtree still brings the style and swagger, and it’s reasonably effective escapism, but it all feels too diluted, even ordinary—competent craftsmanship ensures watchability, not excitability. The climactic dust-up with a car-and-chopper chase, boat escape, and shoot-outs galore is nicely executed, but it goes on too long and stretches plausibility too far (either Shaft is bulletproof or that helicopter shooter would have flunked out of Stormtrooper school). Isaac Hayes declined to return to write new music, leaving director Parks in charge of the compositions. Script by Ernest Tidyman, who wrote the “Shaft” novel that the first film was based on. Followed by Shaft in Africa.

67/100