2PAC ALL EYEZ ON ME MOVIE MOVIE
The soundtrack soon enough elicits more giggles than head bobs, with the movie cramming in as many songs as possible, despite having no problem skipping around a short career timeline from album to album, underestimating the creation of such pivotal songs in the process.īoom’s counterproductive answer to the flawed aspects of Tupac is to deny that very complexity and to make him a type of savior, which often makes “All Eyez on Me” only plainly terrible. I especially loved the man who played Snoop Dogg and then lip-synced his dialogue with that of the real Snoop’s voice (or it sounded very much like it). Gurira too has to work with rotten dialogue and cliche situations, but it’s the one glimmer that feels like an expression instead of a duplication.įor everyone else, including Tupac, Boom’s biopic is more concerned with information than humanity, and eventually Boom’s shallow dedication to showing us recognizable moments or outfits becomes plainly goofy. She appears throughout the movie as a force that challenges Tupac in one way or the other.
But Boom's lifeless direction still taunts, like when we have to watch Shipp lip-sync to Tupac songs for ten minutes or so during a concert, or watch numerous macho confrontations play out with the camerawork of soap operas.Īlthough the movie is wholly allergic to nuance, there is some shred of an emotional arc that arises with the relationship Tupac has with his mother, Afeni Shakur ( Danai Gurira). It functions like a tacky gangster movie of heavy glares and heated confrontations, all while leaning heavily on the “ Julius Caesar”-esque elements of Tupac’s last months. “All Eyez on Me”’s most accomplished factor might be its third act, in which Tupac joins Death Row Records and signs a deal with the devilish Suge Knight ( Dominic L. Even when the narrative framing device of an interview in prison creates exposition out of Tupac debating himself with his interviewee, it’s pithy and cheap. Aside from hammy moments in which he surveys a concert crowd with a bright spotlight on him, he’s rarely shown simply thinking, considering. This version of Tupac is always doing, in service of presenting all that he did but not so much what was going on on the inside. Demetrius Shipp Jr.’s invested performance of Tupac is reduced to an impersonation, and an essential part of the rapper is underestimated: his mind. There is no air in this movie-the kind of air that turns faces on the big screen into our thoughtful surrogates, regardless as to whether the character is fictional or not. As the editing leaps from one Important Moment to the next, the timeline becomes confusing and bold-faced, underlined emotions never resonate. Moments are flattened, diced and spoken through cliches, like when Tupac defends his teen pregnancy song “Brenda’s Got a Baby” to a couple of white record executives, or when he later realizes that because the world is watching him closely, he should name his album … well, you get it. Boom’s film overzealously hits all of these (unless it’s something that makes Tupac look bad) and compiles them like a greatest hits collection that only features the simple choruses and never the contemplative verses.
There are so many fascinating parts to Tupac’s 25 years on Earth: his upbringing in a family of Black Panthers and mostly women his young interest in acting and Shakespeare his ascent in the pop charts as a no-holds-barred storyteller and, of course, the debate about the merit of his obscene lyrics, especially in regards to treatment of women and animosity towards the police.
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