All Eyez on Me (2017)
★★½ — All Eyez on Me (2017)
Benny Boom, a director best known for music videos and the straight-to-video action market (he helmed two of the 50 Cent "Before I Self Destruct" era productions), stepped into decidedly bigger territory with this authorised biographical picture about Tupac Shakur, who was shot and killed in Las Vegas in September 1996 at the age of 25. The project had a long, complicated development, passing through multiple hands over nearly two decades, with John Singleton (Boyz n the Hood) attached at various points before ultimately departing. Released in June 2017, the same year as the acclaimed Notorious B.I.G. documentary "Who Shot Ya?", it arrived amid renewed mainstream interest in 1990s hip-hop history, and drew immediate comparisons, mostly unfavourable, to the slicker and better-received Straight Outta Compton (2015).
All Eyez on Me (2017) is a well-intentioned but deeply flawed attempt to capture the life of Tupac Shakur, one of hip-hop’s most complex, poetic, and politically charged voices. The film gets the surface right: Demetrius Shipp Jr. bears a striking resemblance to Pac, and the soundtrack pulses with his iconic music, which alone carries emotional weight. There are moments that hint at the fire that made Tupac a cultural lightning rod, his charisma, his rage, his vulnerability. But where it fails (and fails hard) is in capturing the man behind the myth. Tupac wasn’t just a rapper; he was a thinker, a son of Black Panther activists, a student of Shakespeare and Sun Tzu, a voice for the marginalized who wrestled with contradictions: thug and intellectual, revolutionary and entertainer, poet and provocateur. The film reduces him to a series of events (feuds, shootings, studio sessions) without plumbing his inner world or the ideas that fueled his art. It’s biography as bullet points, not as soul. The pacing is rushed, the dialogue often clunky, and the supporting characters feel like cardboard cutouts. Worse, it leans into sensationalism while sidestepping the depth of his activism, his writings, and his philosophical evolution. You leave knowing what happened, but not why it mattered. Respectable in parts, but ultimately a missed opportunity. It looks like Tupac, sounds like Tupac, but never truly feels like him. For a man who demanded to be seen in full, this portrait feels frustratingly incomplete.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2017 | Watched: 2026-02-18
Where to watch (UK)
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