Last Man Standing — Nick Broomfield’s flimsy follow-up to Biggie & Tupac

Investing

At the time of writing Suge Knight, former CEO of hip-hop record label Death Row, is three years into a 28-year jail sentence for a lethal hit-and-run. Footage of the verdict saw the hulking Knight as heavy as ever but somehow smaller too — diminished. Cue British director Nick Broomfield with Last Man Standing, a follow-up to his 2002 documentary Biggie & Tupac. That film concerned the killings of rappers Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G., implicating Knight and the Los Angeles police. If you wonder why Broomfield is back on the beat, the answer lies in that courtroom scene. With Knight inside, he says, he can get answers he couldn’t the first time from people who wouldn’t talk back then.

Hmm. Two decades later, something feels instinctively off about the sight of Broomfield disembarking in South LA with his signature English bumble. The director seems to know it. Rather than position himself on-camera, he introduces Pam Brooks, a Compton local credited as co-producer. She, the film explains, will broker sit-downs with former associates of Knight. “They white but they black,” she tells one about Broomfield and his crew, a remark the director chooses to leave in.

New testimony comes largely from Knight’s former henchmen, greying ex-cons who confirm that the Death Row offices were a clubhouse for Blood gang members. There are stories of nihilistic violence and Knight’s piranha tank, a generalised expansion of the thesis that rogue LAPD officers were central to the murders. Actual evidence? A damning photograph is said to connect the plotters to the chief of police. We don’t see it. Broomfield never has either. It “mysteriously disappeared”. The official investigation is rubbished, although less time is spent explaining why than bemoaning the author getting a series on Netflix.

Your inner judge may sigh, raise the gavel and ask if Broomfield has anything else. Not much. The bulk of the film is a simple redux of the same deeply depressing story, two huge talents dead. The industry around them goes on. “Things Done Changed”, Notorious B.I.G. once rapped. Yet so much stays the same.

★★☆☆☆

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