Metacritic reviews

All Eyez On Me is enthralling, exhilarating and at times maddening.

Overlong, more solid than inspiring, it makes a good go of illustrating just how much fame, music and controversy the man squeezed into 25 short years.

Comprehensive but sketchy, richly atmospheric but often under-dramatized, it is not, in the end, a very good movie.... Yet it’s highly worth seeing, because in its volatility and hunger, and the desperation of its violence, it captures something about the space in which Tupac Shakur lived.

Boom’s film (penned by Jeremy Haft, Eddie Gonzalez, and Steven Bagatourian) initially reads as a timely rallying cry around Shakur’s legacy, before devolving into a paint-by-the-numbers biopic that unspools with as much energy as a Wikipedia entry.

While there is a propulsive energy to some of the film, there is also a sense that a lot of territory is being covered. And not all of it – a nit-picking examination of Tupac’s contractual woes for example – is as dramatically compelling as the central arc of Tupac’s bright-burning stellar rise and fall.

All Eyez on Me risks little, and as a result it’s not worthy of his complicated legacy.

A cheap, lazy exercise in myth-making. The goods, as it were, will have to be found elsewhere.

Given the tragic and highly charged events it depicts, All Eyez on Me is oddly low on emotional bite, perhaps because it never feels real. As clean and polished and blandly overlit as a TV soap opera, Boom’s film looks and feels smaller than Tupac’s cinematic life story.

The dramatized movie we’ve gotten, All Eyez On Me, is a hagiographic dud that unfolds like a depth-free magazine listicle.

All Eyez on Me, a fictionalized film biography of Shakur, directed by Benny Boom and starring Demetrius Shipp Jr., is not only a clumsy and often bland account of his life and work, but it also gives little genuine insight into his thought, talent or personality.