The spine of the film is its close-up portrait of Tupac Shakur. In “Last Man Standing,” Broomfield comes close to answering the questions - of guilt and recrimination - that have hung over these murders for too long. The movie asks us to connect the dots, and provides a great many dots there are also tales of shattering viciousness. But Broomfield talks to a great many people (gang members, former bodyguards and henchmen, friends and associates of Tupac and Biggie), and what emerges from their testimony is a heightened look at a cultural moment - in hip-hop, and in the marketing of nihilism as celebrity. “Last Man Standing” is, for Broomfield, a relatively prosaic piece of filmmaking (the director, who we hear tossing out questions, doesn’t place himself at the center of the movie in a way that lent his earlier films a suspenseful charge). Knight is now serving a 28-year prison sentence for voluntary manslaughter (in 2018, he was convicted of committing a fatal hit-and-run), and with the former rap mogul behind bars, a lot of his former associates are a lot less scared of him than they used to be. He has also, for what it’s worth, dropped the Tupac/Suge conspiracy theory. were connected to Suge Knight’s empire, and that they were likely involved in the murder of Biggie. But Broomfield builds on a thesis that he presented in “Biggie & Tupac”: that rogue members of the L.A.P.D. No, it’s not a smoking gun in the form of forensic evidence that proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that this person assassinated Biggie Smalls. Having seen “Last Man Standing,” I can testify that he does. ![]() And if Broomfield was returning to it, it seemed likely that he had something: more evidence, maybe a smoking gun. In the two decades since “Biggie & Tupac,” the investigation of these dual hip-hop homicides has become a kind of industry, propelled by books, nonfiction series, even dramatic features (like the recent “City of Lies,” starring Johnny Depp). So when I learned that Broomfield had made “Last Man Standing: Suge Knight and the Murders of Biggie & Tupac,” returning to this subject with a kind of dogged obsession, I approached the film with a ripe sense of anticipation. When Broomfield made his second Aileen Wuornos film, “Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer,” in 2003, it was a much greater documentary than the first, building on what he had done before. At the same time, the film flirted with a major conspiracy theory, suggesting that Suge Knight might have killed Tupac, his golden goose, to keep him from leaving Death Row. It was a movie that dove into key questions and pushed them further and further, all driven by Broomfield’s unshakable (and valid) conviction that the way these two murders actually went down mattered a great deal in the world at large. “Biggie & Tupac” didn’t present definitive evidence of anything, but it offered what was at the time a groundbreaking portrait of life at Death Row Records, the underworld music empire presided over by the gangsta entrepreneur Suge Knight. The movie arrived at a moment when Broomfield had begun to style himself as a kind of high-end tabloid detective, plumbing the mysteries behind such sensational stories as the rise of Heidi Fleiss (“Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam”), the suicide of Kurt Cobain (“Kurt & Courtney”), and the life and death of the serial killer Aileen Wuornos (Broomfield made not one but two films about her). It was 19 years ago that Nick Broomfield, that spiky and compelling one-man band of documentary filmmakers, released “Biggie & Tupac” (2002), his chilling, no-frills, down-the-mean-streets-of-Compton investigative look into the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls.
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