"The true and untold story of prolific rapper, actor, poet and activist Tupac Shakur"
Despite the tagline, if you are well versed in Pac's life, there won't be much 'untold' information here. If you are not, then I think this fills you in with many of the major moments of his life. At the same time though, I think you'd have to know something about Pac and the rap world in the '90s or you would probably be a little lost as there isn't a lot of background info given at times. However, while it touches on many key junctures and a plethora of Pac's hits from 'Brenda's Got a Baby', 'I Get Around', 'Keep Ya Head Up', 'California Love', 'Hail Mary', '2 of Amerikaz Most Wante'd, and his featured 'Same Song', that will all get you moving, it doesn't quite give you a sense of his impact beyond the hit songs and acting roles. It also doesn't provide much information regarding why he got into music and how he developed his talent of writing and rapping in any detail at all apart from the fact he got a notebook for a present one Christmas. As a lot of his impact has come since his death, I feel they could have even used the closing credits to demonstrate this a bit better than they did.
As happened with 'Straight Outta Compton', others have complained about some important figures not being featured, from his close friend Treach, Madonna, his wife Keisha Morris, Yo-Yo to the Outlawz. It could be argued that the film doesn't go into enough depth regarding the enormity of the East Vs West beef or his work rate in the studio either, (there is a nice little detail provided of Pac telling the engineer to double his vocals), but in reality, it all comes down to duration. They're not going to make this film go toe to toe with 'The Godfather: Part II' for running time. What do they leave out? It's already a long film. The only option was to focus on one integral part of his life rather than the whole thing. Just quietly, I think that wouldn't have pleased everyone either and you'd still have many of the same complaints. The 'true' part of the tagline has also come under fire, particularly from Jada Pinkett Smith who has questioned how their relationship was characterized. From what I know the main points of this remain fairly true to the real story of Pac, down to the careful choice of clothing in any scene reflecting an important real-life moment that was captured by film.
The acting was always going to be a talking point with Pac being a larger than life figure. At first I didn't think Demetrius was pulling it off at all, but the longer the film went, the more I felt the performance. I think the scenes show this well when Jamal Woolard is on screen who plays The Notorious B.I.G.. I can't remember what I thought when I saw Notorious but Demetrius seems much more like Pac than Jamal seems like Biggie. Elsewhere, Dominic L. Santana, who plays the man-mountain that is Suge Knight, or 'Big Suge' as he is often referred to in this, does a good job portraying the intimidating figure, as does Chris Clarke who is excellent as Shock G. Jarrett Ellis who plays Snoop Dogg, looks enough like a young Calvin Broadus I guess, but because Snoop dubbs the character's voice it felt odd to me... His dialogue was always so basic as well. The super producer, Daz, played by his son Azad Arnaud, was another strange one. While he is on the screen for a short time, it was like they didn't want to show his face and when he speaks it's...uninspiring.
As the rating suggests, it's not a brilliant biopic, but with Pac packing so much into his 25 years on Earth, it was never all going to fit into two hours, so people with that complaint need to finance a miniseries. In my opinion it serves as a decent visual representation of his life from his upbringing in New York and relationship with his mother, Afeni Shakur, how fame changed him, how he was targeted by feds, the infamous beef, through to his untimely death. While I knew many of the details about Pac, I was still fairly engaged and it still had me screaming at him to stay with Kidada rather than hitting the club with Suge in the BMW and it had me singing Pac songs to myself for the rest of the day and checking out any of his discography I'd missed.
-md.jpg)
Comments