All Eyez on Me Review

R: Language and Drug Use Throughout, Violence, Some Nudity and Sexuality 

Summit Entertainment, Morgan Creek Productions, Program Pictures, Codeblack Films

2 Hrs and 20 Minutes

Cast: Demetrius Shipp Jr., Kat Graham, Jamal Woolard, Lauren Cohan, Hill Harper, Danai Gurira

REVIEW: We all know the story of rapper Tupac Shakur. He was one of the biggest hip-hop artists of the 90s. It was weird that for so long, nobody has ever attempted to do a biopic about him. Honestly, how could you pull off a Tupac biopic if you didn’t have somebody whose face was similar like Tupac’s? He was one of those rappers with a distinct face. Believe it or not, a perfect guy named Demetrius Shipp Jr. whose face eerily looks like Tupac was found. Now he has an entire movie all to himself and wow did they fuck that up.

Tells the true and untold story of prolific rapper, actor, poet and activist Tupac Shakur. The film follows Shakur from his early days in New York City to his evolution into being one of the world's most recognized and influential voices before his untimely death at the age of 25. Against all odds, Shakur's raw talent, powerful lyrics and revolutionary mind-set propelled him into becoming a cultural icon whose legacy continues to grow long after his passing. 

THE GOOD: Congratulations Tupac fans, you finally have a Tupac movie.

THE BAD: I can just imagine how this movie got into production. I can imagine the situation where a studio producer went to a meeting and said, 

“Hey, we got a guy who looks like Tupac.”

And then the studio head would go, “Can he act?”

“No.”

“Do you have a script?”

“No.”

“Excuse me?”

“No no no we have a script. I mean we printed out Tupac’s Wikipedia page, so that’s something.”

“Fine. Here's $45 million. Go have fun.”

If there were ever a disjointed made-for-BET R-rated movie, it would be this.  This film is a collection of montages that never seems to connect to anything. It is like a 6th grader wrote this script and had no experience of screenwriting at all. The screenwriter doesn't even get literary references right. There's a scene where Tupac is conversing with Biggie, and he quotes Julius Ceasar. Biggie asks, “what's that,” and Shakur responds with, “Hamlet.”

One of the most important words you'll hear about this film is how its disjointed. Let me tell you an example of how this film is so disjointed. You know all the hard-hitting moments in Straight Outta Compton? Well, let's have a biopic with nothing but those moments.

The film opens with Pac looking at his audience as he’s onstage as fans cheering his name.

No no that is not the opening. This is the opening:

So the film opens with Pac going to jail over the rape scandal as he’s about to be interviewed.

WAIT! THATS NOT THE OPENING THIS IS THE OPENING:

WE OPEN ON A FLASHBACK TO TUPAC’S UPBRINGING 

I am not lying, this is only five minutes into the movie, and the film manages to have more openings than Return of the King had many endings. 

The entire film has no connecting scenes that you can never immerse yourself into whatever is going on. Watching this movie is like talking to a hardcore Tupac fan who can never fully explain who he was besides “the best rapper of all time.” It's like talking to a guy who goes, “MAAAAN TUPAC WAS THE DOPEST RAPPER EVER,” then proceeds explaining everything he did without describing who he was.

What a biopic should do is show the real side of the subject whose story is being told. The movie should show the subject's strengths, and weaknesses as a human being for we all have flaws. The reason why this tremendously fails is that this only shows Tupac as a perfect upright guy and nothing else. He’s always the smart guy in the room with all the right things to say with everyone responding to him lovingly. This made him look like such a flawless human being; he might as well be Jesus Christ. God forbids the man did anything wrong in his career.

I've never seen anything so atrociously spliced together but feel so apart. This is the worst edited movies I’ve seen since Suicide Squad.  When someone gets sometime punched, at random points the speed will slow down like that precise moment is supposed to be significant when you know it's not. There's another instance where Tupac puts on headphones as he gets ready to record a track and the speed slows down again. You don’t even hear or see him rap for it just fades to white as it transitions to the aftermath of his recording. 

Every other scene begins with an expositional shot that states the location and the year a particular event takes place. You see that in every biopic. You can tell this editor lost his damn mind putting this film together that the date and year turn into what is Tupac doing at the moment. You have Pac watching his film Juice in a theater, and at the bottom, the text just says “JUICE PREMIERE.” When Tupac visits his dad, you see at the bottom the text states, “TUPAC VISITS MUGATU.” It's as if the editor needed to remind himself whatever scene he was editing was. Then after he edited that said scene, he accidentally sent it to dailies where the director accepted how it was and wanted no changes.

This movie may have $45 million behind it, but you can tell this was made on the cheap.

THIS MOVIE IS SO CHEAP THAT:

1) Every time there was a performance scene, EVERYONE PERFORMS ON THE SAME EXACT STAGE! You see that same stage in every scene where someone performs. You actually see the same exact locations throughout the entire film.

2) It can't even get its casting right. Outside of Tupac and Biggie, none of the actors who are playing these rappers don't even look like who they’re supposed to be. When someone in the film goes, “Oh hey Dr. Dre” or “Hey Suge Knight,” you’re expected to believe they are this rapper when they look nothing like him. By the time the guy who's supposed to be Snoop Dogg comes in, you just give up, especially when SNOOP DOGG dubs all of his lines!

3) It doesn't attempt to age Tupac well in the regards of casting. You see him go from being a kid to a teenager, but instead of him being played by an actual adolescent, you have him just turn into his adult actor, Demetrius Shipp Jr.

Saying something like "This movie makes Straight Outta Compton look like Citizen Kane," is a redundant statement because Straight Outta Compton on its own is a genuinely great movie. So instead of that, I’ll say All Eyez on Me makes NOTORIOUS look like Citizen Kane. As subpar Notorious was, that film had character, tension, style, and most of all A COHERENT FUCKING NARRATIVE! It is good to see the guy who played Biggie in 2009, Jamal Woolard to show up in this movie still looks like Biggie to this day. The only downside of it though was that he lost the voice of Biggie. It has been eight years since that movie came out so of course, he was going to age.

People argue to this day who was the better rapper of the 90s Tupac or Biggie. I don’t know about all that, but I can tell you who has the better biopic. In this, his delivery is only on Rottweiler mode from beginning to end.

The film follows the same story structure of Straight Outta Compton and plays beat after beat of it, but does it incredibly hammy. It never works in its favor for even a minute, and this is A 2 HOUR AND 20 MINUTE MOVIE!!! The reason why Straight Outta Compton worked was because of F. Gary Gray. The man knows how to direct stories. The man knows how to direct actors. He knows how to captivate his audience. Benny Boom, on the other hand, does not. You can tell all of his actors are given the direction of giving it all a 10 and never come down from it. The man has a lot of recognizable music videos under his belt but not enough films to prove he has what it takes to direct a biopic. F. Gary Grey had enough credits in his filmography in his corner to back up his capabilities to direct a biopic. It was never only Friday for him for it was much more. Benny Boom only had Next Day Air, a 2009 film that nobody ever saw or ever heard of.

One of the only people in here that I believe deserves so much better is Danai Gurira who is overacting her ass off. You can tell she was given no direction but to do her best Viola Davis impersonation as possible. She is only told act like Viola Davis did in Fences but to copy her skill that used in her Oscar Winning breaking scene. If a performance ever felt so plagiarized. In the beginning, Gurira interacts with another guy who is soft spoken and straight-faced while she responds back in the most stereotypical way a black woman could. At first, you're going, "Okay she's not doing a good job so far. The movie has just begun she can become better." In a way she does, but the only reason is that everyone else around her is terrible.

LAST STATEMENT: With a script that feels loosely based off a Wikipedia page and lazily cheap production throughout, All Eyez on Me is a hollowly pretentious biopic that's equivalent to talking to the biggest Tupac fan for 140 minutes.

Rating: 0.5/5 | 12%

Happy Birthday, Tupac. Sorry you have a shitty movie in your name

Super Scene: Mama Shakur visits her son in jail