ALL EYEZ ON ME Review: Staring Through The Rear View

The shadow of the brief life of Tupac Shakur looms large over American hip-hop culture two decades on from his death in Las Vegas in 1996. His impact can be felt in the art created by those who by their own admission are offspring of the efforts he made in his art form. On 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar’s epic-rap masterpiece, Lamar ends his lengthy sonic journey with a long-form ‘interview’ with Shakur, his great inspiration. After a long exploration of themes Shakur spoke on regularly in his work, the weight of hearing Shakur’s voice, literally speaking to Lamar from beyond the grave, is especially moving. The most remarkable element of this is the immediate real-world relevance of his words, and how little has changed for his people and the society in which they live.

That same weight, to capture the all-encompassing enormity of Shakur’s work and achievements in the name of black people living under the thumb of an oppressive system, lies heavy on the shoulders of All Eyez On Me, a messy but fascinating exercise exploring (and contributing to) the myth-making of the man. Indeed, the film seems acutely aware of this, and diverts this to a degree through the performance of Demetrius Shipp Jr., who looks frighteningly similar to Pac, but fails to capture the soulfulness and spirit of the man. The film is evidently aware that no matter how similar the visage, there is so much about Shakur that is unknown or simply unknowable, and so the film willingly remains oblique about Shakur’s process, and even to a degree what motivated that creative soul beyond a little Shakespeare now and then. I’ll confess that my knowledge of Shakur’s catalogue is only just below surface-level, but the film does well to remain outside of the realm of the esoteric – it's far more concerned with capturing the vivid, broad strokes of the life and the circumstances around which it was made possible.

Attempting (and failing to) encompass the entirety of Shakur’s life, beginning at the womb and ending with the tomb, the film’s greatest downfall is that it fails to consistently achieve anything approaching a narrative flow. At times one feels like it is checking off certain elements – early days on both the East and West Coast? Check. First major label? Check. First run in with Big? Check. The laundry list effect is so impactful that the film feels unnecessarily rushed, without giving anything a real chance to stick. Several scenes, particularly in the early going, feel edited to within an inch of their life, meaning certain characters flit by in the blink of an eye (hi and bye, Lauren Cohan!). Director Benny Boom is unfortunately arguably the culprit of the film’s myriad weaknesses. Best known for a number of great music videos, Boom’s work here at times drifts into the dreaded TV-movie sphere (an early scene in which a young Tupac recites Shakespeare to a class of high-schoolers is especially cringeworthy). Boom shoots a number of key sequences in a way that made me wish for a more confident visual artist to match the poetry of its subject. This is not helped by an unfortunate framing device in which an incarcerated Shakur relates his life story to an interviewer, until Shakur is released halfway through the film and the device is entirely dropped – it feels cheap and cumbersome, and weighs down the first half so severely that the film almost atrophies, despite some exceptionally dedicated performances (the problems with which again feel like the result of an over-zealous director).

To its credit, the film greatly improves once this device is dropped and the timeline loosens up a bit. With less ground to cover post-incarceration, the film explores the themes Shakur’s life’s work covered more freely, along with the impact of the man even as he was living. There is a vitality, a fervour to the work that stuck with me even as I struggled with the way the material had been executed. The people both behind and in front of the camera are clearly exceptionally passionate about the work they are doing – too much so, perhaps, in the case of Danai Gurira, who gives a superlative but at times excessively histrionic turn in the role of Shakur’s mother Afeni Shakur. The real standout is Kat Graham who makes a soulful if all-too-brief turn as Jada Pinkett, Shakur’s long-time friend.

It is hard to consider a film like All Eyez On Me outside of the shadow of another great piece of art from 2015 – NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton. Where All Eyez On Me often veers wildly off the tracks, or suffers from a lack of nuance in its narrative or visual storytelling, its predecessor (who unfortunately for this film covers much of the same ground in a far more energetic and poetic manner) felt assured, lean and purposeful, though both suffer from more than a little hagiography (perhaps rightfully so, considering the socio-political environment into which both were born). All Eyez On Me also inherits many of the issues that that film carried and adds to them, not least of which its issues with women, particularly black women. In both films women’s bodies are largely telegraphed as sex-objects that come with material success, but whose sexuality is a source of sinfulness and destruction for the noble main characters. This depiction, or as sexless mother figures worshipping at the altar of Shakur throughout (with the notable exception of Graham’s Jada Pinkett), is about as deep as the film seems willing to go with it’s women roles. The film would’ve undercut some of this if its critique of Shakur went beyond surface-level, particularly in an especially troublesome sequence handling Shakur’s rape and sexual abuse case that saw him later convicted. The film plays this as a great injustice which – regardless of one’s position on the allegations or on Ayanna Jackson’s disputing narrative of what happened in a hotel in 1993 – means depicting Jackson as a hysterical, gold-digging liar, an exceptionally troubling position to take on a case with several conflicting positions.

I find myself troubled by All Eyez On Me, whose flaws in most cases are an indictment on the watchability of the film. And yet, I was nevertheless haunted by some of the moments in the film, where the impact of the work and the love, inspiration and hope people found in the man’s lyrics suggest the way that the myth may be as significant as the man in the retelling. Shakur is a giant in hip-hop culture, but in his political and social activism, Shakur has arisen to an almost untouchable position. Far be it for me to attempt to encapsulate his impact on black men and women in America, but something in the messy, beguiling volatility of All Eyez On Me gives me some notion of the way a poet’s soul can speak to a generation.