All Eyez on Me review

At the time of his death in 1996 Rapper/actor Tupac Shakur was seen as a successful musician but a controversial figure in pop-culture, having been shot and imprisoned within the short span of his life as a professional “gangster” rapper in the early 90s. His message of message of ‘thug life’ and his profanity laced lyrics that detailed the hard conditions of inner city black youth made him the target of white politicians who tried to blame him and other hip-hop artists at the time for inciting violence towards each other and the police.

Despite the controversy that surrounded his life, in retrospect Shakur has become something of a John Lennon for American people of color. His lyrics were sometimes crass and violent but having been raised by an ex black-panther and trained in Elizabethan poetry at the Baltimore School for the Arts , his political views on poverty and class dynamics were decades ahead of his time, sharpening rhetoric that both the Bernie Sanders campaign and the Black Lives Matter movement would classify today as #woke.  It’s too bad that director Benny Boom’s two hour and twenty biopic “All Eyez on Me” couldn’t live up to the expectations of representing Shakur’s life in a way that isn’t painfully literal or linear.

Newly discovered 2Pac lookalike Demetrius Shipp Jr. is a convincing lead and clearly has spent a long time studying the artist’s speech patterns, gestures and ticks.  Given that half the work is already done for him physically—the similarities are at times uncanny—it’s commendable that he also worked hard to internalize the role and bring forth an emotional reality to his character. Boom however did not make as a strong of considerations towards the project surrounding this performance, and what is left is an awkwardly paced, Wikipedia-scripted, birth-to-burial biopic that often feels like a made-for-TV melodrama that’s full of jarring transitions and hokey, soap-opera dialogue.

Danai Gurira as Tupac’a mother Afeni is usually dialed two or three notches above where her performance should be, and the who’s who of actors who stumble in to cameo as Tupac’s hip-hop contemporaries, such as Biggie Smalls (Jamal Woolard), Snoop Dogg (Jarrett Ellis), and Suge Knight (Dominic L. Santana), are given so little to do and have so little agency in the plot that the movie quickly becomes a slide-show of hip-hop royalty. This, along with the incessant cutting back and forth in the timeline to explicate each scene with a jail-interview framing device that’s abandoned half way through, breaks up the dramatic tension, creating the feeling that the film is longer than necessary and obnoxiously episodic.

Among the larger problems plaguing the feature, there are a few moments that to aid the movie’s cinematic momentum. The concert sequences have palpably electric and they help to keep things lively. In the few moments of dialogue that aren’t incredibly on-the-nose, such as some of the tense exchanges between Pac and Suge and a small but nice scene with Shakur and his high-school girlfriend earlier in the film, the movie occasionally lands on the perfect frequency between blacksploitation camp and Oscar-clip self-parody.

Too much of the film is poorly executed to be great, but a decent 90 minute cut exists somewhere in this labored assembly. As is usually the case with biopics about past icons and celebrities, Benny Boom needed to narrow his scope and decide what story he wanted to tell about the artist, rather than skipping along the loose themes about death and redemption and daddy issues as they float past the narrative.  Since “All Eyez on Me” is currently our only 2pac movie we have, it will have to suffice, and the performance by Demetrius Shipp Jr. is something to behold, but the movie lacks the discipline and the economic storytelling that it needs to emotionally connect with an audience.

Grade: C-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jul-2017

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