Last Man Standing

Bare­ly a week goes by with­out the release of a new film, pod­cast, book or doc­u­men­tary series excit­ed­ly exam­in­ing the killings of gang­ster rap deities Big­gie and 2Pac. The lat­est, Last Man Stand­ing, sees vet­er­an British doc mak­er Nick Broom­field return to Los Ange­les to probe the two unsolved mur­der cas­es, act­ing as a con­tin­u­a­tion of sorts of his prob­ing 2002 film, Big­gie and Tupac.

Broom­field is chap­er­oned by plucky Comp­ton local Pam Brooks, as the pair speak to for­mer gang mem­bers con­nect­ed with Suge Knight, the infa­mous for­mer Death Row Records CEO who was dri­ving the car that artist Tupac Shakur was fatal­ly shot in on 7 Sep­tem­ber, 1996.

We sub­se­quent­ly learn about the younger Knight, who liked his chick­en cooked a cer­tain way, and how as an adult he kept black pira­nhas, appar­ent­ly sig­ni­fy­ing his James Bond vil­lain cre­den­tials. The prob­lem is that Broom­field is des­per­ate to arrange the puz­zle pieces so that the dis­graced Knight is posi­tioned as the sole bogey­man of the piece, and as such it doesn’t feel like we’re giv­en a bal­anced account of the events that transpired.

The first half of the doc­u­men­tary revis­its famil­iar ground, recy­cling tropes and sto­ries about Death Row’s Tupac years that have been in the pub­lic domain for decades. Tupac is pre­sent­ed as the doe-eyed vic­tim, led astray by Knight’s gang pol­i­tics, even though archival pho­tos clear­ly show them degrad­ing women side-by-side.

As soon as some­one sug­gests an alter­na­tive the­o­ry – like a his­tor­i­cal­ly vio­lent Tupac will­ing­ly lean­ing into Blood affil­i­a­tion, P Diddy’s rival Bad Boy Records also being sur­round­ed by mur­der­ous gang mem­bers, or a gen­er­ous Knight spend­ing mil­lions of dol­lars to feed sin­gle moth­ers and employ home­less peo­ple – it’s quick­ly super­seded by a more thor­ough anec­dote by a hang­er-on that eager­ly posi­tions Knight as the dev­il incarnate.

The doc­u­men­tary real­ly gets going when it moves past Tupac hagiog­ra­phy and the events of his Las Vegas shoot­ing, which, by this point, has long been unof­fi­cial­ly solved. There’s some fresh leads on the unsolved mur­der of Big­gie Smalls in March of 1997, with cor­rupt LAPD offi­cers linked to Knight and Death Row once again fin­gered as like­ly culprits.

Broom­field leans heav­i­ly on clips from his pre­vi­ous Big­gie and Tupac doc­u­men­tary, which con­tains fas­ci­nat­ing insight from the late Rus­sell Poole, an LAPD offi­cer whose career came to an end after he attempt­ed to expose dirty cops he alleged made mon­ey on the side as con­tract killers and secu­ri­ty guards. The defence of Poole is this documentary’s most heart­en­ing moment, and it’s a shame that this seg­ment isn’t explored more deeply.

Had Broom­field focused more on Big­gie and looked at how white insti­tu­tions are often com­plic­it in the demise of Black icons, whether through wil­ful igno­rance (in the case of Inter­scope) or sys­temic cor­rup­tion, then this film might have been worth­while. As things are, Last Man Stand­ing feels like a cut-and-paste job, rushed to mar­ket to tap into a grow­ing demand for ​’90s nostalgia.

And much like var­i­ous oth­er filmic explo­rations into the Big­gie and Tupac mur­ders, Broomfield’s film, replete with cheap G‑Funk instru­men­tals and ran­dom archive shots of black men being arrest­ed by police offi­cers, feels more than a lit­tle voyeuris­tic. One sto­ry about white execs at Death Row’s par­ent com­pa­ny, Inter­scope, ignor­ing the screams from beat­ings next door is unde­ni­ably hor­ri­fy­ing, but it’s noth­ing new, with online 2Pac sleuths like DJ Vlad and The Art of Dia­logue reveal­ing juici­er sto­ries about the West Coast rap label with each new inter­view they pub­lish. Arguably, these YouTu­bers are now beat­ing Broom­field at his own inves­tiga­tive game.