Demetrius Shipp Jr.
Between his 1991 debut and a violent death just a handful of years later, the iconic West Coast emcee and rap superstar known as 2Pac released five studio albums, more than a dozen music videos and starred in five movies.
Over that same period, he also survived being shot five times, served nine months in prison for sexual assault and had numerous other run-ins with law enforcement — including a fight where he shot two off-duty cops — and sent his mother to rehab for drug addiction. And in 1996, when his life ended in a barrage of bullets in Las Vegas, 2Pac — who was also largely known by his birth name Tupac Shakur — was in the middle of a raging, cross-country rap rivalry and was engaged to Quincy Jones’ daughter.
That’s a lot of life to pack into just five years. It’s also a lot to pack into a movie.
And although Hollywood has succeeded many times in re-telling complex, fast-paced tales like that of Shakur's tumultuous yet brief 25 years on the planet, the new biopic about his life, All Eyez on Me, fails fast and hard to show all that he was to hip-hop culture and the black community.
Instead of capturing the stark contradictions and duality of Shakur’s existence as a gun-toting, womanizing gangster and that of a pro-black poet/activist looking to lift up his community, the movie — released June 16, which would have been his 46th birthday — is little more than a watered-down, bland chronology of his life that’s plagued by equal parts under- and over-acting.
Opening with a prison interview with a Rolling Stone reporter, the film uses that setting as a backdrop to anchor flashbacks from Shakur’s life as he pushes through life difficulties such as having the FBI raid his childhood home on Christmas day and being shuffled around the country with his sister as his mother begins to slip away just as he is launching his rap career.
While there are a few good parts, such as reenactments of concerts and recording studio scenes, details like bad lip-syncing from Demetrius Shipp Jr., who plays Shakur, and overzealous acting by Danai Gurira, who plays his mother, tend to distract from the film.
And rather than trying to pack in every fight and feud he had from birth to death, director Benny Boom should have cherry-picked and dug into the pivotal points of Shakur’s life, such as the interactions with his mother or the struggle with friend-turned-enemy and fellow rapper Notorious B.I.G., to establish meaningful milestones.
What’s troubling about this flat attempt at capturing Shakur’s life is that recent rap biopics — for example, Notorious, about the life and death of B.I.G., and Straight Outta Compton, about the pioneering gangster rap group N.W.A. — were so well executed — we know it can be done.
In the end, fans are better off with the autobiography ‘Pac left us in his music and the many on- and off-camera interviews he did in the short time we had him.
