Review of All Eyez on Me (2017) by Jin T — 03 Apr 2018

It has a Z because it's from the hood, yo!

ALL EYEZ ON ME.

Before this film, I hadn't heard one single 2pac song. All I knew was that he was shot. After this movie, my curiosity hasn't increased, I won't go home to hear more of him, as I feel his legacy has been spat on by this careless movie. This has no regard to a what a biopic should be and it's a fantastic showcase of ignorance behind the camera. Besides the average to poor performances (the mother aims for Meryl but ends up in Lohan), all the technical and creative efforts amount to nothing palpable on screen. The least this movie could do was sparing us the 2h20min runtime so it became more bearable yet, of course, this black sheep as been rotten since this horrifying script's inception. Although it's solid from an ideological point of view, the directing and the editing work together to produce a chaotic overcome. The director has no idea where to place the camera or how to compose a good looking shot or even the relationship and distance to the camera and what that tells the audience. Mise-en-scene and a respect for angle rules are foreign concepts. It also makes a poor use of the token cinematic devices like unforgivable fades to black, messy flares, idiotic slowmo and specially an unjustifiable use of shaky cam. However, the most sinful aspect in this movie is Oscar winner Joel Cox's editing which has the focus of a rabbit on speed. Structurally it crumbles as inter-cutting an interview with flashbacks is so beaten up that you have to do it inventively at this point; All scenes are cut so carelessly, trying to cram every shot with more cuts than a Marvel movie, that it makes up for a disorienting experience. 90% of the shots don't go together even if you put super glue on them; and any level of commotion is treated with a tide of shots that neither make sense together nor they serve a purpose. Adding to the fact that tonal shifts are more than plenty throughout the movie, you simply can't get immersed. There was no care storyboarding, shooting or editing this movie. The result is a story worth telling done in the most haphazardly fashion.