Film

The rise-to-demise arc of Biggie Smalls—Christopher Wallace to his mom, the Notorious B.I.G. to his fans—is one bitter American success story, complete with class aspirations and ironic cultural give-and-take. Maybe it’s stupid to expect complexities to be dealt with in a movie designed for easy digestion, much less one directed by George Tillman Jr.—the gentleman responsible for such true-story triteness as Men of Honor (2000). Still, you could assume that the chubby Brooklynite’s ascension to Greatest Rapper Ever contender would yield something more than just a stock compilation of music-biopic clichés, right? No dice; even considering the genre’s restrictive template, everything that was larger-than-life about Biggie is boiled down to reductive contrasts. He was poor, then became rich. He slung rock on the corner, then slung rhymes in the studio. He lived, then he died.

RIP, B.I.G.

Hate the game, not the players: As Wallace, Jamal Woolard gets the raspy, slurry baritone down pat, even if he only scratches the surface of the heavyweight’s charisma. Wisely, Derek Luke doesn’t try to turn his Sean Combs into a Cristal-consuming caricature (which puts him one up on the real Puffy), while Voletta Wallace’s avatar, Angela Bassett, puts her Ruby Dee–isms on hold to give one grieving glance maximum gravitas. But at the risk of sounding like a broken record,
B.I.G. was a master storyteller who could lay out a lifetime’s worth of dreams and dread in eight bars. Notorious delivers nothing but clumsy filmmaking and a greatest-hits checklist, without offering insight into the man or his myth. If you don’t know now…you still won’t know.