Tupac biopic flops

like a soapy made-for-TV biodrama.

In purely financial terms, is it easy to see why All Eyez on Me got made. Two decades after after his death, Tupac remains big business. The bulk of his 75 million album sales have been posthumous, and his annual earnings often surpass today’s hip-hop royalty. There is plainly a large potential audience for Boom’s film; it is just a shame it’s being served up in such a conventional cookie-cutter affair.

The saving grace here is bigscreen debutant Demetrius Shipp Jr., whose father actually worked with Tupac on one of his later albums. Besides an uncanny physical resemblance, 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.

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. 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). Propelled to fame as a fringe member of Oakland rap crew Digital Underground, Tupac emerges as a charismatic new voice in hip-hop. Initially a kind of ghetto social commentator, he adopts an increasingly nihilistic “gangsta” persona that gradually consumes him. The pivotal point comes with him serving jail time for sexual assault in 1995, which only amplifies his outlaw image