All Eyez on Me (2017)
★★½ — All Eyez on Me (2017)
Tupac Shakur was one of the most electric, contradictory, and genuinely brilliant figures American music has ever produced. A son of Black Panther activists who could quote Shakespeare and Sun Tzu. A poet who wrapped revolutionary anger in street vernacular. A man who seemed to contain multitudes almost by design. So when a biopic comes along, the bar isn't just high, it's almost impossibly so. And All Eyez on Me, for all its good intentions, doesn't clear it.
Let me be fair where fair is due. Demetrius Shipp Jr. is genuinely striking in the lead role. The physical resemblance is uncanny, and there are flickers, brief ones, where you can feel the magnetism that made Tupac a cultural lightning rod. The soundtrack does a lot of heavy lifting too. When his music fills the room, the film briefly comes alive in a way the script alone never manages. That's not nothing. But it's also not enough.
The problem is that the film seems far more comfortable cataloguing events than exploring the man behind them. You get the feuds, the shootings, the studio sessions, the headlines. What you don't get is any real sense of what was going on inside his head. Tupac wasn't just a rapper moving from one controversy to the next. He was a thinker wrestling with enormous contradictions: thug and intellectual, revolutionary and entertainer, provocateur and poet. That tension is where all the real drama lives. And the film largely ignores it in favour of getting from one scene to the next as quickly as possible.
The pacing is one of the bigger culprits. Events pile up with so little breathing room that nothing lands with the weight it deserves. The dialogue doesn't help either. Too much of it is clunky, functional at best, cringe-inducing at worst. And the supporting characters are drawn so thinly they barely register as people. They're furniture, placed around Shipp Jr. to give him someone to talk at.
What really stings, though, is how much the film leans into sensationalism while quietly sidesteppingthe depth of his activism, his writings, and the way his thinking genuinely evolved over time. There was a philosophical journey happening in that short life. The film gestures at it but never commits. It's biography as bullet points rather than as anything approaching a soul.
I've seen biopics handle difficult, layered subjects with far more courage. Beautiful Boy (2018) is a good example of a film willing to sit inside its subject's contradictions rather than just narrating them from the outside. That willingness to dwell, to be uncomfortable, is exactly what's missing here.
It's worth saying that none of this reads like cynicism or indifference on the part of the filmmakers. The film feels like it genuinely wants to honour Tupac. But good intentions don't paper over structural failings, and the structure here is shaky from the ground up. A more honest, more searching approach would have meant fewer events and more interiority. Less "and then, and then, and then" and more asking what any of it actually meant to him.
Two and a half stars. All Eyez on Me looks like Tupac. It sounds like Tupac. But it never truly feels like him. And for a man who spent his entire career demanding to be seen in full, as a contradiction, as a thinker, as a human being rather than a symbol, this portrait feels frustratingly, almost painfully, incomplete.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2017 | Watched: 2026-02-18
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