The unsolved murders of Tupac Shakur and Christopher "Biggie Smalls" Wallace still stir the public's imagination after 20 years. Yet law enforcement has been at a standstill to produce results. The producers of "American Federale" and the first two "Assassination" films, finally unravel the tangled cases and expose not only who may have done it, but also why these cases have never seen justice. Battle For Compton" is the story of "The Machine"; a group of high powered individuals with a very dark secret they killed to keep, and have spent the last 20 years hiding- hoping one day it will all go away- before they do.
Dan_Tebasco
Review by Dan_Tebasco ★★★
The third Tupac Assassination film and definitly the best of the bunch, as the previous 2 were sloppily made and rather forgettable. The previous installments was TUPAC ASSASSINATION and TUPAC ASSASSINATION II: THE RECKONING (revised, rereleased and repackaged as TUPAC AFTERMATH).
Now that said, this is still not a great piece of documentarial work. In fact the editing is still not that good, I do believe that Richard Bond should have left the editing to the proffesionals.
Very often you are given information in form of written text and audio, and some of these times the information is different from the other so you have to be able to not only read and process what is said in written form while simultaniously processing whatever the person interviewed is saying.
Which makes it a bit confusing at times and you kind of have to add 1 and 1 together to get what they are trying to say with the documentary and instead of digging deeper and deeper into some information that seems important they instead just jump to the next thin on their mind.
As expected a bunch of the clips in the video are reused footage from the previous Tupac Assassination films and interviews that Jesse Surratt (aka J Mix) made for his youtube-channel which is dedicated to the life of Tupac and people that knew him (who got a producer slot on this film) and from other stuff.
Another thing is they add a couple things that are pointless to the subject really, like for instance they talk about there being disputes within Death Row.
Which is fine and all but some examples they give are really stupid, like for instance they have an interview with Crooked I talking about how there was a DVD made by the Crips dissing Death Row.
And they make it look like this happened in 1996. First off, DVD's didn't exist in 1996. Secondly the DVD in question is a DVD called THA ROW KILLA which wasn't released until 2003, many many years after both Big and Pac had been dead and is completely irrelevant to anything in the documentary.
And stuff of this nature, not too much of it luckily but some. And often names are spelled wrong and the like. So yeah needless to say it's a bit rough-handled.
It also pack in a segment where they discredit the documentary/book MURDER RAP which came out last year and people then saw as the gospel of how it all went down. But learning my own experience from watching BIGGIE AND TUPAC by Nick Broomfield when it came out and thinking that Suge Knight was the man behind the killing for many years (to later realise that that was pretty dumb) I knew better than to jump to any conclusions that time around. Especially considering the fishy circumstances of the interview of the alleged driver of the shooting (which was really the only 'proof' that documentary offered).
Anyway just like the documentary I'm straying a bit away from the topic here, but yeah it's a decent watch. But if you don't have any background information on Death Row records, Tupac Shakur etc etc you'll probably not understand half of what is being talked about. And even then it will probably be a bit confusing... That said, the theory given is a pretty interesting one.