Following up his 2002 documentary Biggie & Tupac, filmmaker Nick Broomfield probes deeper into Death Row Records impresario Suge Knight’s involvement in the murder of the two rappers, probing the idea the LAPD colluded in the crime.
Nearly 20 years after his first visit, documentarian Nick Broomfield returns to the mean streets of South Central LA to continue his investigation into the unsolved murder of rap legends Christopher “Biggie” Smalls and Tupac Shakur. His latest film, Last Man Standing: Suge Knight And The Murders Of Biggie & Tupac to give it its full unwieldy title, updates his 2012 documentary, Biggie & Tupac (simpler, snappier), this time delving into the role Marion “Suge” Knight, the head of Death Row Records, played in the crime. It’s an interesting primer in real-life rap battles (rather than the YouTube ones) but if you’ve seen the first film, you might feel a little short-changed.
The first two thirds offer a detailed portrait of Knight. Broomfield is guided around Compton by local Pam Brooks, who sets up interviews with Death Row Records employees and gang members. Broomfield posits, following the rap mogul’s sentencing for the manslaughter of music exec Terry Carter, those in Knight’s circle are able to talk more freely. If this new-found liberation doesn’t really throw up any hard evidence (but we do learn about Knight’s taste in chicken), it does give more of a sense of the dark heart in Knight’s circle, evoking the machismo (Knight’s office boasted a tank of black piranhas) and misogyny in the Death Row Records empire, a subsidiary of the seemingly oblivious Interscope. As a recap of the East Coast vs West Coast feud and a snapshot of what fuelled the ’90s rap wars, Last Man Standing works well.
With new testimony, Broomfield adds a little more meat to the bone of this theory but it’s hardly conclusive.
But, with material repeated from the first film and taking a long time to deal with the police collusion that seems to be the film’s raison d’être, Last Man Standing stalls. Broomfield once again draws deeply from the material featuring the insights of late LAPD officer Russell Poole, who was sacked for exposing corrupt cops who he alleged were involved in covering up Knight’s complicity in the murders. With new testimony, Broomfield adds a little more meat to the bone of this theory but it’s hardly conclusive.
If it lacks startling new material, Broomfield’s filmmaking style also feels conventional. Mostly eschewing the posh-man-with-a-mic approach that is his stock-in-trade, Broomfield’s M.O. is a bog-standard talking heads/archive approach, intercut with stock footage of Black men harassed by the cops, all to synthetic versions of menacing beats. If Last Man Standing adds more texture to the Biggie/Tupac story, it doesn’t join the dots to create a wider, more incisive portrait of institutional white racism. In this day and age, you’d feel that it’s the least it can do.