Demetrius Shipp Jr.’s invested performance of Tupac is reduced to an impersonation, and an essential part of the rapper is underestimated: his mind. There is no air in this movie-the kind of air that turns faces on the big screen into our thoughtful surrogates, regardless as to whether the character is fictional or not. As the editing leaps from one Important Moment to the next, the timeline becomes confusing and bold-faced, underlined emotions never resonate.
Moments are flattened, diced and spoken through cliches, like when Tupac defends his teen pregnancy song “Brenda’s Got a Baby” to a couple of white record executives, or when he later realizes that because the world is watching him closely, he should name his album … well, you get it. Boom’s film overzealously hits all of these (unless it’s something that makes Tupac look bad) and compiles them like a greatest hits collection that only features the simple choruses and never the contemplative verses. Read the whole review at are so many fascinating parts to Tupac’s 25 years on Earth: his upbringing in a family of Black Panthers and mostly women his young interest in acting and Shakespeare his ascent in the pop charts as a no-holds-barred storyteller and, of course, the debate about the merit of his obscene lyrics, especially in regards to treatment of women and animosity towards the police.
Sure, we see flashbacks galore and are privy to relationships in Shakur's life many might not be aware of that inherently give new light to this persona that has been crafted by the media and his constituent's since his death, but none of it to such an extent we feel we're inside the mind of Tupac thus restricting us from feeling like we've seen the real story of the man's life. does in fact attempt to delve into this clash of consciousness Shakur constantly dealt with it's never able to transcend the tropes of the music biography enough to allow the audience to understand what cultivated and motivated these feelings. And while All Eyez on Me and its look-alike lead in newcomer Demetrius Shipp Jr. Shakur was a man who seemingly had a constant conflict of conscience going on within him-attempting to balance the obligation he felt he had as an orator for the black community while simultaneously looking to solve such societal issues in the moment which often times resulted in compulsive acts of violence and/or spouting things from his mouth that he didn't consider before saying them in front of a rolling camera. With this weight and presumed pressure of responsibility on his shoulders Boom has delivered what is more or less a by the numbers biopic for what was very clearly an individual who couldn't have operated by the numbers if he wanted to. There has been a barrage of material released since the artist's untimely death in September of 1996, but All Eyez on Me would mark the first narrative feature and arguably the one with the best odds of reaching the widest audience. All of that to say director Benny Boom (Next Day Air) and his team of three rather novice screenwriters had a lot to overcome in order to deliver a final product that was not only satisfying, but relevant in terms of adding something substantial to the conversation around the life and times of Shakur. Since his death over twenty years ago Tupac Shakur has become something of a prophet in his legacy a deity of the rap world in which the mythology only continues to grow-building a perception and persona of a man who held some secret as to how our society operated and why when, and this is the most valuable thing the new biopic All Eyez on Me offers, it seems the alarmingly young Shakur was still very much trying to figure out who he was never mind the bigger questions the culture he was raised in implied for his future and the future state of our world.
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