Tupac

I saw Notorious the other night, and since the movie was kind of boring, I found myself wondering if there was a Tupac conspiracy movie out there somewhere. I was right!




The whole movie is available here. It's kind of boring. I don't recommend watching the whole thing. It goes into excruciating detail to set up the incident of Tupac's shooting, using extensive interviews with Tupac's body guards and police officers who were involved. Although there are some neat 3d models of Tupac's, the assassin's and the other cars at the scene, and some trippy water backgrounds, it lacks the graphics of other low budget conspiracy movies like Zeitgeist and Loose Change, but to be fair, it attempts to tackle a much smaller scale conspiracy.

The set up is reminiscent of the JFK assassination, but instead of the government loosening JFK's security and planting shooters, it was Tupac's label, Death Row, and it's owner, Suge Knight.

Basically, the idea is that Suge Knight, the owner of Tupac's label, Death Row, paid their security team to back off Tupac on the night of his murder. Tupac's altercations with Orlando Anderson and the East Coast/West Coast thing, which Notorious depicts, but never in depth, are used to obscure the real motivation behind the murder. Suge Knight obviously had cause for wanting to get rid of Tupac, who wanted to get out of Death Row and start his own label, Makaveli. Apparently Knight had kept the master tapes of Tupac's sessions for Death Row, which were worth a ton of money. I don't think it's much of a stretch that Suge Knight, who is obviously kind of a crazy thug, would arrange for Tupac's assassination. The one assumption that I can't really believe is that Tupac's security team could be bought. I mean, I know everyone has a price, but I just don't think those dudes would want to do that. The main piece of evidence in the film is a radio communication overheard by one of the body guards, Michael Moore who was taken off Tupac because he wasn't going along with the orders of the owner, Reggie Wright, in which the shooter tells Wright that the job is done or something.

The second half of the movie is about the ensuing coverup orchestrated by Knight and other to keep the police investigation from getting to them. There's really very little evidence, or even decent conjecture, in the movie, that clears anything up, especially since Tupac was also a pretty crazy guy, as you see in Notorious when he suspects Biggie of trying to set him up. Tupac's wikipedia is worth checking out, if you haven't. Apparently his dad was a Black Panther and his mom was on the FBI's Top Ten Most Wanted list for four years.

I did like the rules of a conspiracy that the film tried to use as a structure for the interviews and buildup of their case, because they're kinda dumb, but maybe I'll start applying them to other conspiracies:

1. Take out communication
2. Take away security
3. Set up escape and patsy
4. Give a false sense of security
5. Make it look like a random act

I knew pretty much from the opening monologue that this movie was going to suck, because the narration was so terrible, with lines like: "What's also interesting about Tupac is the way he died" and "One of the most notorious unsolved murders of the past twenty years." Obviously Tupac's murder is interesting. Duh. And what? The past twenty years? Were their a string of high profile murders in the late eighties that I don't know about?

But it did reference Occam's Razor, which I appreciated, though they used the simplistic definition, "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one." If the film makers had read my blog, they would understand that that is an oversimplification, and maybe they would have made a better movie. I think they make it decently clear that there was some foul play involved in Tupac's murder, and that Suge Knight was possibly involved, but they don't make any of it seem urgent or particularly interesting. There's no sense of fear that good conspiracy films are able to instill in viewers.