In doing so it infantilizes the man and diminishes his legacy. Obviously these are contentious and legally delicate matters, but too much of All Eyez on Me seems designed to sell Tupac as a saintly soul who was too good for this sinful world. The real “Briana” (her name was changed for the film) has published her version of these events online, and it makes for ugly reading.
The rape case also plays out in a painstakingly one-sided manner, with Tupac as wholly innocent victim and his female accuser Briana (Erica Pinkett) presented as a stalker-level groupie. Nuance and context are lost in translation. This clumsy narrative device helps explain why the screenplay omits a few inconvenient truths entirely, including the rapper’s youthful flirtation with Communism, his previous prison term for assaulting Menace II Society co-director Allen Hughes and his brief marriage to longtime girlfriend Keisha Morris.
The first half of the pic is framed in flashback as a video journalist (Hill Harper) interviews Tupac in jail, laying out key episodes from his life as a series of subjective vignettes. 'All Eyez on Me': The Legal Battle Over Bringing Tupac's Life to the Screen A thuddingly on-the-nose screenplay makes heavy work of this duality, repeatedly underscoring the sensitive artist behind the angry rapper by having Tupac quote lines from Shakespeare.
But he is also a smart kid, gifted poet and aspiring actor, studying drama alongside close platonic friend and future movie star Jada Pinkett (Kat Graham). Raised in Harlem, Baltimore and the Bay Area by single mother Afeni Shakur ( Danai Gurira), a militant member of the Black Panther Party, Tupac grows up with sharp first-hand knowledge of systemic racism and police brutality. His luminous performance is all the more vivid set against a largely one-dimensional backdrop of supporting characters. Besides being an uncanny physical match, Shipp persuasively embodies the late rapper’s sweet charm and sex appeal, though he is less convincing at summoning his volatile, violent, self-destructive side. The saving grace here is big-screen debutant Demetrius Shipp Jr., whose father actually worked with Tupac on one of his later albums. There is plainly a large potential audience for Boom’s film it is just a shame they are being served up such a conventional cookie-cutter affair. He even performed in hologram form at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in 2012. The bulk of his 75 million album sales have been posthumous, and his annual earnings often surpass today’s hip-hop royalty. Two decades after after his death, Tupac remains big business. In purely financial terms, is it easy to see why All Eyez on Me got made.