All Eyez on Me (2017)
★★½ — All Eyez on Me (2017)
Tupac Shakur was killed in Las Vegas in September 1996, aged twenty-five, and in the decades since his death his stature has only grown. He remains one of the most discussed, analysed and mythologised figures in American music history: a rapper and actor whose work touched on race, poverty, police brutality and Black identity in ways that still resonate. Any film attempting to tell his story is immediately shouldering an enormous weight of expectation, both from fans who feel a personal connection to his music and from critics who know how much of his life, political formation and inner contradictions simply cannot be squeezed into a single feature. 1917, another history film covered on this site, shows how the genre can land with real force when it commits fully to its subject. Whether All Eyez on Me manages anything similar is, of course, the question.
The film was produced by Morgan Creek Entertainment, The Program Pictures and Voltage Pictures, and released in 2017, which happened to coincide with what would have been Shakur's forty-sixth birthday. Behind the camera is Benny Boom, a director whose background lies largely in music videos and television, which perhaps explains both the film's visual confidence with performance footage and some of its structural choices. At 139 minutes the production is not short on ambition, even if runtime alone is no guarantee of depth. For a sense of how the history drama genre can handle a human life with real texture, it is worth glancing at the site's take on Apocalypto, another history film reviewed here, or the quieter, more considered approach found in Josep.
In the lead role, Demetrius Shipp Jr. carries the physical resemblance to Shakur in a way that is genuinely striking, a polished but unremarkable piece of casting that succeeds on one level while raising questions about whether likeness alone is enough. Danai Gurira, a formidable screen presence in her own right, takes on the role of Afeni Shakur, Tupac's mother and a former Black Panther activist whose influence on his thinking was profound. Kat Graham and Jamal Woolard round out a cast that also includes Dominic L. Santana. The performances sit within a production that is clearly trying to do justice to a complicated, layered man, and whether it succeeds in that is what any honest review of the film has to wrestle with.
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.
I keep coming back to that central problem: there is a difference between a film that covers a life and one that actually illuminates it. For a figure as self-aware and philosophically engaged as Shakur, the biopic format almost needs to bend itself out of shape to do him justice, and this one never quite attempts that. The music does a lot of the heavy lifting, which is both a tribute to how good that catalogue is and a quiet admission that the screenplay cannot match it. If you are a fan, there is something here worth seeing once, if only to weigh it against what you already know. But come away from it, and what lingers is less the film itself than the reminder of just how much more there was to say.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2017 | Watched: 2026-02-18
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for All Eyez on Me (2017) on YouTube
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