Why You Should Save Your Money & Not See The New Tupac Biopic

all eyez on me

In the words of LeBron James, “Are you a smart guy?” I think so. If you think so, and believe yourself to be smart —be you a guy, a gal, or swimming somewhere in between like a salmon— then don’t watch All Eyez On Me. Because, time and again, at every turn, the film assumes that you’re stupid.

Rather than choosing, say, a particular period of time for its tale of gangster-rap legend Tupac Shakur —one, perhaps, where the micro speaks to the macro— this obligatory biopic tries to have it all; uncorking every music-biopic cliché as it goes. Like Dewey Cox thinking about his entire life before he plays, here, Tupac thinks about his entire life… in an interview! In an amusingly-artless short-cut, he’s answering questions for a documentary crew, not long before his eventual demise. Meaning, we not only track through his childhood, adolescence, early career, breakout acting roles, and troublesome lyrics, but then have them discussed aloud by interviewer, a stand in for Shakur’s every critic.

Years and place names are teletyped on screen. When a recreated music video is shown, it comes with the classic MTV release info (Title/Artist/Album/Director/Label/etc) displayed. When a famous person enters the frame, they’re instantly announced (“Dr. Dre in the motherfuckin’ house!”; etc). Rousing speeches are delivered. Eureka moments are turned into facepalm-worthy disasters (looking for a name for an album, and, thus, the film, Tupac says “I feel like I’ve got everyone watching me…”). When good things happen, people laugh and dance. When bad things happen, sad music plays. When anyone gets shot, a camera cranes up. When a violent figure enters, foreboding music plays. Foreshadowing runs rampant (“baby, let’s just stay in all night” his love-interest pleads, on the night our hero is due to die). Real MTV News bulletins fill us in on developments. Newspaper headlines are turned into a montage. At one point, Tupac mentions “all that shit I’ve got going on, court cases and all that”, but you don’t know exactly what he’s talking about. The old cinematic maxim ‘show, don’t tell’ is ignored, routinely. Everything is explained away, boiled down, made simple. The assumption is that you’re stupid. When really it’s just All Eyez On Me.

The film is an eye-popping 140 minutes long, which suggests not its prestige-picture worth —or, even, some attempt at a tentpole spectacle— only that it’s filled with too much stuff. Rather than choosing wisely, All Eyez On Me tries to tell it all, and, thus, feels forever truncated. Tupac shoots an off-duty cop in Atlanta, and then it’s forgotten about. His mom buys drugs, goes into rehab, comes out clean. The sister from his childhood is mentioned, late in the film, with some throwaway line about how she’s raising her own kids now. Faith Evans shows up for 30 seconds. The overall effect is a film in a rush to get from one place to the next; its endless montages and musical stings artless, restless.

And, somewhere, we’ve gotta mention the endless rap-video girls, anonymous women in various states of undress who are never named, heard from, or given an iota of humanity. Watching the film, I took down the note ‘Levitating Female Torsos’ to describe them: their heads and legs are routinely cropped out, the oft-uncredited actresses merely employed to be breasts floating in the background. One scene begins with a tracking close-up on a giant ass, striding away from camera; which feels less rap-video, more porn-video.

The whole magilla plays like a lowbrow telemovie; its ‘official biopic’ status no sign of any worth. And, it’s impossible to ignore how All Eyez On Me arrives shamelessly coattailing on the goodwill earned by last year’s hella-successful N.W.A. rumpus Straight Outta Compton. Whilst that film even generated some mild Oscar buzz —earning a Best Original Screenplay nomination— no one should come to this film expecting anything similar.

All Eyez On Me’s trio of screenwriters boast back-catalogue work like the Just Dance Kids video-game series and Street Kings 2: Motor City; having got the gig, seemingly, for writing one episode of Empire. Director Benny Boom has a long history of directing hip-hop videos, but his last feature film was 2011’s S.W.A.T.: Firefight, one of those straight-to-DVD sequels to barely-remembered cinematic titles made for the express purpose of lining impulse-purchase bins by big-box checkouts. And the lead, Demetrius Shipp Jr., may look just like Tupac, but that’s the sole reason he’s gotten the gig; he doing little, in his first acting role, to suggest he should ever headline another film.

Shipp spends much of All Eyez On Me lip-syncing. Given the production’s granted access to the Tupac back-catalogue, the executive decision has been made to keep the originals intact. Maybe that seemed like the ‘right’ thing to do in theory, but this means that whenever wee see our hero in action —in the studio or on stage— he ain’t rhymin’, but mimin’.

Even crazier: another debutante actor, Jarrett Ellis, plays Snoop Dogg; cast, again, due to bearing a likeness to the rapper. But, evidently, Ellis couldn’t do the Snoop voice; and, so, his lines of dialogue have been re-recorded, seemingly by the OG himself, a work of dubbing that’s unconvincing, and forever distracting, like Snoop has momentarily hijacked the audio track. It’s at this point we should remember that, in Straight Outta Compton, a young Snoop was played by LaKeith fucking Stanfield, one of the best young actors in the world; making this embarrassing Doggy-ventriloquism act one almighty step-down.

The net effect of all these clichés, lookalike castings, and vocal-booth Milli Vanilli turns is that nothing in All Eyez On Me lives up to the moments when they just pipe in 2Pac jams on the soundtrack. Hell, the most exciting scene in the film might be when our young hero joins Digital Underground on stage for The Humpty Dance. If you really want to see a young Tupac doing the Humpty Hump, well, click away. It’ll save you 140 minutes, 20 bucks, and having your intelligence insulted.

whitney: can i be me

An unofficial documentary about Whitney Houston made by career muckraker Nick Broomfield (Heidi Fliss: Hollywood Madam, Kurt & Courtney, Biggie & Tupac, etc) sounds like a recipe for scandal, slander, schadenfreude. You can picture it in advance: the old English gentleman, trademark boom-mic in hand, showing up on Bobby Brown’s doorstep, just wanting to have a chat about crack. Instead, Whitney: Can I Be Me is a sincere, surprisingly-sweet valentine to the late singer; with Broomfield, notably, not seen in a single frame.

Making the film, Broomfield admits that —digging through archival footage, old interviews, and concert footage— he fell in love with his subject. He’s not the only one. The people who speak herein aren’t those tending to her estate, wanting to further a myth, or bearing an axe to grind. Instead, they’re the people —musicians, bodyguards, old friends— who loved her from the periphery, forced to watch her demise from a distance. The villains of the piece —her parents, Bobby Brown, crack— are shown in archival footage; the appearance of each bringing with it an implicit doom.

Whitney: Can I Be Me is effecting, and unexpectedly tender. But, ultimately, it plays a lot like a B-grade Amy. Their stories are chillingly similar: prodigious talent, impish sense of humour, wild early success, music-biz exploitation, bloodsucking family members, on-stage meltdowns, debilitating drug abuse, rampant enabling, early death. Though Whitney does have some revealing behind-the-scenes footage, the film doesn’t quite get at the human at its centre; its titular subject remaining a celebrity, the documentary more glimpse-behind-the-curtain than intimate revelation.