Notorious

Pros: Pretty good direction, some good acting by Basset and Luke, the music of cou
Cons: Nothing revealed, rushed feel.
(This review originally appeared in different form on Epinions.com)

When I first saw a trailer for Notorious, my initial thought was “wow they did the Biggie movie pretty quickly. Next up, the Tupac movie”.
Yet I was curious to see it seeing as I own and love both of Biggie Smalls’ albums. Seeing as I like director George Tillman Jr’s work (Soul Food, Men Of Honor) as melodramatic as it can get at times. Seeing as I find myself drawn to bio-pics of musicians I like even as many of them turn out tto e average or bad for every good one.
Yet I missed seeing Notorious during its theatrical run. In fact I more or less forgot about it until about a year ago when I went iinto my local FYE and bought the remastered version of Ready To Die to replace the original (which got stolen from me at a party in the late 90s). After taking the album home and giving it a re-listen for the first time in a couple years, I remembered Notorious. So I rented it from Netflix.

Tillman’s direction is very good here. The film is shot well, there is some good acting and the way he integrates the music into the story is very good. Unfortunately, on the whole, Notorious is a letdown.
First off, this movie doesn’t really tell me anything about Biggie that I didn’t already know or couldn’t just as easily learn from reading his WIkipedia entry. We see him played in a sort of fast-forward fashion. His life is shown and high points are touched on. But we never really get a feel for the man. The movie has a rushed feel, similar to Oliver Stone’s George W Bush movie, although this one is better put together that the Stone film.
As other reviewers have pointed out, the movie doesn’t really show the talent in Christopher Wallace, the drive that made him successful for a brief period in the mid 90s. It depicts what happened to him as being based primarily on luck and while luck did play something of a role, he would not be as well-regarded today if the talent wasn’t there.

On the plus side, there is some good acting here. The best performance is by (the underused nowadays) Angela Basset as Voletta Wallace, Biggie’s mother. There’s also good acting by Derek Luke as Sean “Puffy’Puff Daddy/P Diddy/Diddy/Diddy Whatever He’s Callimg Himself nowadays” Combs and Anthony Mackie as Biggie’s friend turned foe Tupac. This leads to another plus for Notorious: it gets the details of the Biggie-Tupac feud down right as far as I can tell. Jamal Woolard is okay as Biggie. He looks like him. But he never really brings him to life.
In some ways I suspect that the problem might be that Tillman and his screenwriters were not sure how to handle a Biggie bio-pic. It’s easy to forget that Biggie’s time in the spotlight was relatively short. Unlike with a Ray or Walk The Line, there wasn’t a massive wealth of material for the filmmakers to draw from. So in trying to follow the conventional approach, they ended up short-changing their subject.
Notorious is far from the level of a Walk The Line. But it’s ahead of misfires like The Doors and Why Do Fools Fall In Love. But if you want to learn about Biggie Smalls I’d suggest reading the book Unbelievable that this movie was based on. Of course I’d also suggest buying both Ready To Die and Life After Death if you don’t own them already.