All Eyez on Me

Demetrius Shipp Jr bears an uncanny resemblance to Shakur but doesn't quite possess the star quality to outshine the script, which is leaden and flatly expositional.

Its reverence and sketchiness gets between the viewer and the subject.

How they managed to make a movie about a guy who went from poverty to fame to prison to fame again, before being shot five times and surviving, and then being shot four times and dying, into something as compelling as a tax return is anyone's guess.

The movie churns out his story like sausage meat: turgidly linear, and tasteless in a literal sense of dead-on-the-palate.

It has similar material - with similar scenes and similar tropes - to F Gary Gray's Straight Outta Compton, about NWA, but with less passion and less energy.

This Wikipedia-page biopic races through the rapper's Major Life Events without ever getting to grips with the real questions.

All Eyez on Me attempts to reconcile an iconic figure with his very complex life. Its important commentary on race, however, gets overshadowed by technical problems.

Structurally the film has problems, but the movie finishes strong with Boom doing a good job of building some tension in the final moments leading up to the fatal Las Vegas drive-by shooting.

It's a closer call than you might think, but All Eyez on Me sells Tupac's life short.

All Eyez on Me is a sad contrast to the power of Tupac's words that have captivated fans over the years.