Cinema
Gang Related
(15, selected cinemas)
Laughs and violence
Mark Steyn
I've always had a soft spot for gangsta rap, thanks to whose practitioners pop music is at last as dangerous as it's claimed to be for 40 years. Unlike the middle-class art-school nancies of Britain's rock pan- theon, these guys mean it; Snoop Doggy Dogg was acquitted for murder; 01' Dirty Bastard had his liver riddled with bullets by some even dirtier bastards. Granted that the music has nothing of interest melodi- cally or harmonically, it seems entirely rea- sonable that stellar gangstas should use their CDs mostly to ventilate their inter- minable intra-rap feuds.
Thus, on his 1996 hit single Hit 'Em Up, 2Pac Shakur taunted fellow rapper The Notorious B.I.G. by claiming to have slept with Mrs B.I.G. — or, as 2Pac put it, 'I flicked your bitch, you fat muthafucka.' A few months later, 2Pac was gunned down in a drive-by shooting. A few months after that, The Notorious B.I.G. met a similar E.N.D. Even I, merely for suggesting that the American media's eulogies for 2Pac might have been a touch extravagant, received half a dozen death threats which is six more than I've ever received for writing about, say, Pickettywitch or Showaddywaddy.
Anyway, this week 'Pac's back in Jim Koufs Gang Related, a film dedicated to his memory, containing as it does his last screen performance. When 2Pac was shot dead at the age of 25, the rock critics on the squaresville papers saw it as an inex- orable tragedy of Sophoclean proportions — which is true up to a point: like Oedi- pus, 2Pac was a real bad muthafucka. More cautious commentators saw it as a remorse- less tragedy of Shakespearean proportions: like Hamlet, he was supposedly riven by internal agonising. 'To pack or not to pack? That is the question,' he no doubt mused as he pondered how many concealed firearms to wear to the MTV Awards. To those of us sceptical of this interpretation of his brief 'Thug Life' (the words tattooed on his belly), Gang Related almost makes the case. For starters, in a belated nod towards the mainstream, he abandons the vanity licence-plate formulation of his latter days — 2Pac — to return to the more conven- tional appellatory form of Tupac.
The film begins with all the beloved clichés of the genre: the city at night, loan sharks, a drive-by shooting, drug pushers doing deals in seedy neon-lit motel rooms while bored off-duty strippers lounge on the bed. Tupac and James Belushi fit into this world with ease. But then, about ten minutes in, it emerges that our boys are not just dealers, they're cops — officers who've decided to shortcut the justice system by administering on-the-spot death-sentences to the drugs guys. Unfortunately, in his zealousness, Belushi has accidentally killed a Federal undercover agent — the sort of murder even the slothiest police depart- ment feels obliged to investigate. Belushi and Tupac are now feeling the heat. What, wonders 'Pac, will they do? `We're the cops,' says Belushi. 'We're gonna find the fuckin' killers.'
`We are the fuckin' killers,' Tupac points out.
`What difference does that make?' says Belushi.
So off they go, rounding up the usual suspects and attempting to pin the murder on them. Sadly, all of them have iron-clad alibis — one was in jail that weekend, another was in hospital having the bullets removed from his spleen, etc. So Belushi and Tupac wind up making do with a boozed-up brain-frazzled derelict they fish out of an alley. What follows is a kind of dry comedy on the vicissitudes of police framing. You're tempted to invoke Tarantino, except that Koufs blend of laughs and violence seems less contrived and stylised: Belushi is hopelessly naive in his conniving, which gives the plot the air of a Laurel and Hardy narrative let loose in the inner city.
It's odd to see a notorious gangsta rapper on the side of law and order. On his penul- timate album All Eyez On Me (Death Row Records), he called for the freeing of 'all Politikal Prisonerz', a category which includes his stepfather Mutula Shakur. Mutula counts as a political prisoner because, when any black man is jailed by the racist white state, that act by definition is political. It would be interesting to know if, up in heaven, 2Pac takes the same line on his own black murderer, still at large. Such beliefs do not automatically suggest a man who could make a plausible cop. But he can certainly play a Hollywood cop: as Gang Related reminds us, movie cops dress exactly the same as criminals, they deploy `muthafucka' with the same relentlessly uni- versal application, they have the same tastes in whores and strippers — so why not get gangsta rappers to play 'em? The sidekick with a conscience, Tupac does a credible job as the doubting Tonto to Belushi's increasingly deranged Lone Ranger.
One other thing: I had no idea, from his album sleeves, that Tupac was so small and neat — dainty almost. He doesn't look like a thug at all, only a pussycat. Maybe that'll get the death-threats lifted, but I've a feel- ing 'pussycat' isn't a compliment in the rap world.
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