Which, for those of us who’ve been waiting for this for a long time, is a major letdown. Santana) enters stage right and we start slouching towards tragedy, All Eyez on Me already feels like it’s been looking at its subject with one eye closed. Or questionably staging an encounter with Ayanna Jackson, who’d accuse the musician of sexual assault, like a slo-mo R&B video. If he doesn’t quite have the star power that the real Tupac did, the actor does have screen presence to spare.Īnd when the movie briefly allows Shipp to get onstage and drop a few verses, you wish it hadn’t skimped on the actual musical aspects in favor of half-baked attempts at pathos involving Shakur’s mother Afeni ( The Walking Dead‘s Danai Gurira.) Or having a didactic journalist (Hill Harper) play devil’s advocate with an imprisoned Shakur over everything from rap lyrics to responsibility, social consciousness to C. He does his best to convince you that this was a man who was deeply conflicted about whether to start a movement or just keep sipping the Moët. Even when director Benny Boom and a trio of screenwriters keep weighing him down with dramatic dead weight, Shipp keeps his head up. Never mind that he bears an uncanny resemblance to the late Shakur what’s impressive is how he manages to nail the rap star’s rage and swagger, the street smarts and the crazy-sexy-cool vibe.
You want the movie equivalent of “Hit ‘Em Up.” You get something that would’ve been deemed unfit for Loyal to the Game.ĭon’t blame Demetrius Shipp Jr., the newcomer who nabbed the Tupac role. is a real sense of what made Shakur so vital – then and now – or any idea why we superfans and stans still rightfully look at his work as a hip-hop high point. As a bonus, you also get characters who exist solely to spout exposition and/or infomercial taglines (“Well, Interscope was founded as a haven for artistic expression!”) and the sort of clunky, nuance-free filmmaking that keeps pushing the Camp-o-meter into the red.
Less a biopic than a pop-up Wikipedia page, All Eyez on Me covers the bases of Shakur’s story: the early schooling in Shakespeare and militant sloganeering, the formative mistrust of authority, his big break with the Digital Underground, the discovery of his voice, the near-derailment due to his shooting and scandals and incarceration, and the self-destructive free-for-all of the Death Row years.
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