Review – All Eyez On Me
Rapper Tupac Shakur was a unique individual. He was incredibly smart and an extremely talented rapper and actor, making some 0f the greatest hip-hop albums of all time. Yet his personal life was subject to controversy, as it was filled with court cases, shootings, and prison time, all leading up to his untimely death in 1996 at the young age of 25. This man’s life had the makings of a great biopic and after the success of Straight Outta Compton (2015), we saw that making a great hip-hop biopic was possible.
Unfortunately, we got the exact opposite of a great movie. All Eyez On Me is truly one of the most disappointing filmgoing experiences I have had this decade. This Lifetime-esque, painfully cliché highlight reel of Shakur’s life is filled with horrendous performances, terrible direction, and some of the worst editing I have ever seen.
The film opens with Tupac (Demitrius Shipp Jr.) being interviewed while in prison in 1995. The interviewer begins the interview asking about his life growing up and then the film cuts to 1980’s New York. The flashback life story schtick? That’s the route we’re going with this? I guess it worked for Walk the Line (2005), so maybe it will work here.
Nope, it doesn’t. From here, All Eyez On Me is as cliché and unoriginal as biopics get. We start with Tupac’s mom Afeni (Danai Gurira), a Black Panther leader and civil rights activist who is often in trouble with the law, which causes the family to move from New York to Baltimore to California. Afeni becomes addicted to crack, which causes a lot of friction between her and her son. At the same time, however, Tupac has, what seems to be, immediate success in California, as he quickly becomes a backup singer for the hip-hop group Digital Underground, which leads to his big break as a rapper. Then it is movies, albums, and fame, which comes with its share of issues from financial problems, to personal beefs, to court cases, to his questionable signing with Death Row Records, all up until September of 1996, where Tupac was murdered in the middle of the Las Vegas strip after a Mike Tyson fight.
How I just described the movie is exactly how the movie feels. It is just a bunch of quick scenes of Tupac’s most infamous moments, whether good or bad. There is one scene where Tupac is fresh out of prison and just signed with Death Row Records. He then proceeds to record three of his biggest hits, “California Love”, “Ambitionz Az A Ridah”, and “Americaz Most Wanted” all within hours of being with Death Row. Maybe that’s how it happened, but I highly doubt it, as the logistics of making those songs alone would take a good amount of time. Or another scene, where Tupac is in prison on a rape allegation, and out of nowhere, a veteran inmate with no name starts giving Tupac life advice and then is never heard from or seen again except in one small scene five minutes later. They try to show us the friendship between Tupac and Jada Pinkett (Kat Graham) but that is only shown in small intervals through out the movie. Much like Pinkett in the movie, we don’t really get to know anybody in this movie, not even Tupac. The movie is constructed like a cliffnoted version of his life. It only gives us the highlights, but never truly gives us a full idea of any character or a fully realized story.
Shipp Jr. may look like Tupac, but that’s all he has going for him. As I said above, Tupac was talented and smart, but had a quick temper which caused him to make some poor decisions. It is this juxtaposition and contradiction in his life that made Tupac such an interesting character. But we don’t get any of that in this movie. We barely get to know who Tupac was at all. You could read a Wikipedia biography on him and understand him better. The rest of the cast doesn’t do him any favors, as the only decent performance is Jamaal Woolard as Notorious B.I.G. Woolard played Biggie in 2009’s Notorious and did really well in that. He brings the same performance to this film and it is refreshing to see, even if he is only in the movie briefly.
Director Benny Boom does a terrible job fleshing any emotion out of this movie. Everything felt so melodramatic and T.V.-movie that it became laughable. I felt nothing at the end when Tupac got shot, which is a huge problem. I know you might be thinking that that’s because I knew it was coming, but I also knew Eazy-E was going to die of AIDS in Straight Outta Compton, but that movie was done masterfully and my heart broke as we watched Eazy deteriorate before our eyes. Boom also shoots the movie like a freshman film school student, with some of the worst choreographed concert and studio scenes I have ever seen.
My biggest issue with the film is editing, or lack there of. At a painful two hours and twenty minutes, this movie drags, and drags, and drags, with each minute getting worse and worse. The movie is narratively straight forward, but it never feels that way. It is messy, boring, and annoying to watch.
All Eyez On Me is one of the worst movies of 2017. This movie is terrible in every way and tarnishes who Tupac Shakur was. The only positive of this movie is the music, which features some of Tupac’s greatest hits along with some other jams. If you want to keep Tupac’s legacy alive and understand him as a man, listen to his albums, they’ll tell you everything this movie doesn’t.
Did you see All Eyez On Me? What did you think? Comment below or hit me up on Twitter and Instagram, @kevflix, or on Facebook by searching Kevflix.