Shaft in Afrika

After the abysmal Shaft's Big Score, this second follow-up to the original 1971 legend is much finer stuff. John Guillermen takes over from blaxplotation maestro Gordon Parks as director and excellently brings freshness to the whole thing, with Richard Roundtree's supercool private eye being sent to Ethopia in order to infiltrate and bring down a ruthless slave-trading scam.

This entry is wonderfully self-concious in the fact that it all smacks of the Bond saga - even Shaft says it when he finds himself handed a couple of gadgets for his mission. Therefore, there's a strong and largely satisfying formula behind the whole affair. The action is still a little clumsy and quite excessively violent, but in general this is bigger, brighter and funner than what came before it.