All Eyez on Me (2017)

All Eyez on Me arrives as a dutiful chronological parade through the life of Tupac Shakur, framed by a prison interview and narrated with the solemnity of a museum audio guide. Benny Boom directs with competence and almost no invention. Every beat lands exactly where the Wikipedia summary promised it would. Demetrius Shipp Jr. carries the resemblance and a fair amount of the charisma, but the script hands him flat-footed dialogue and asks him to make it sing anyway.

The film's social consciousness is real but inherited, not constructed. Black Panther meetings, neighborhood injustice, the beating over a jaywalking stop: these belong to Tupac's biography, and the movie reports them faithfully. It does not build a thesis on top. Afeni Shakur gets a fierce scene or two, and Jada Pinkett drifts through as a friend, which registers a pulse without amounting to a feminist argument. The friction with record producers is present, though it reads as a business dispute, not an indictment of capital. The political temperature rises and falls with the plot rather than with any argument the filmmakers wish to press.

The omissions are telling. There is no LGBTQ thread, no environmental concern, no meditation on bodies or neurodivergence. This is conventional hagiography with a tragic ending, not a reinterpretation of history for modern appetites. Every so often a character will pause to explain racial injustice in the camera's general direction, and the room goes briefly cold. Then it settles back into the familiar rhythm of rise, fall, gunfire, onscreen text. A serious subject, handled with the ambition of an encyclopedia entry that learned to act. The audience applauded. The critics did not. Both parties were correct about something.