Above the Rim, Gridlock'd, Gang Related: The Final Roles

There’s something vertiginous about watching Tupac’s last films. Two of them came out after his death. On screen you see an actor in full ascent, more and more precise, more and more free, and you know everything stops in September 1996. After Juice and Poetic Justice, here are the four roles that close out his filmography.

Above the Rim (1994): Birdie, back to the dark side

Directed by Jeff Pollack, Above the Rim tells the story of a gifted high school basketball player torn between a college scholarship and the easy money of street tournaments. The easy money is Birdie, the neighborhood dealer, and Tupac plays him. After the gentleness of Lucky in Poetic Justice, he returns to a menacing character, but in a new register: Birdie almost never raises his voice. He smiles, he gives, he envelops, and it’s precisely that calm that chills you.

The shoot took place in late 1993, just as Tupac’s legal troubles were piling up and his life was starting to resemble one long trial. He filmed by day and made headlines or court appearances the rest of the time. That didn’t stop the film from existing, nor, above all, its soundtrack from marking the era. Released by Death Row, it planted the label’s sound at the top of the charts, between Warren G and imperial-period Snoop Dogg, and it contains Tupac tracks that orbit Thug Life. For many people, the soundtrack has aged better than the film. I find that verdict unfair: Birdie remains one of his most controlled performances.

Bullet (1996): opposite Mickey Rourke

An oddity in his filmography, Bullet was shot in 1994 but only released in 1996, and quietly at that. Directed by Julien Temple, the film pits Mickey Rourke, a Jewish ex-con from Brooklyn fresh out of prison, against Tupac as Tank, a one-eyed kingpin who rules the neighborhood and nurses an old grudge. The film is lopsided, suffocatingly dark, but the confrontation between these two bruised souls has something fascinating about it. Rourke and Shakur actually became friends on the shoot, and the American actor would always speak of him with genuine tenderness. One for the completists, though the completists won’t feel cheated.

Gridlock’d (1997): the film that changes everything

Here’s the heart of this article. Gridlock’d, written and directed by Vondie Curtis-Hall, opened in January 1997, four months after Tupac’s death. It’s a black comedy, almost absurdist: Spoon and Stretch, two drug-addicted musicians from Detroit, decide to get clean after their friend’s overdose, and spend the whole film slamming into the Kafkaesque wall of social services while being chased by dealers and mistaken for other people by the police.

Tupac plays Spoon, the more lucid of the two, opposite an unhinged Tim Roth. And it’s a revelation. His sense of comic timing, his ability to play exhaustion, irony, the fear of dying, all without ever overacting: American critics, who had often looked down on him, bowed. Several major reviewers wrote then what the fans already knew, namely that a major actor had just vanished. The scene where Spoon begs to be let into a detox program that very day, because tomorrow he’ll have changed his mind, carries a truth that hurts.

That’s what Gridlock’d hinted at: a Tupac capable of carrying auteur films, of handling comedy as well as drama, of growing old in this profession. You can spend hours imagining what would have come next. It never will.

Gang Related (1997): the last role

Released in October 1997, Gang Related, directed by Jim Kouf, is his final appearance. Tupac plays Rodriguez, a corrupt cop who, with his partner played by James Belushi, executes drug dealers to resell their product, until the day one victim turns out to be an undercover federal agent. The two dirty cops then sink into an increasingly desperate spiral of evidence tampering.

The film is a solid thriller, nothing more, but Tupac is remarkable in it as a man being eaten alive, the one of the two who still has a conscience and can feel it coming apart. The last frame of a career, for an artist of 25: a policeman looking for a way out and finding none. Hard not to read something into that.

Where to watch these films

Gridlock’d and Gang Related are available as digital rentals on the usual platforms, Apple TV and Amazon in particular, and exist on Blu-ray or DVD, sometimes as imports. Above the Rim is the easiest to access, a regular in subscription streaming catalogs as rights rotate. Bullet is the most temperamental: second-hand physical editions or VOD depending on the country, so you sometimes have to hunt a little.

If you only watch one, make it Gridlock’d, no hesitation. And to go further, the period also tells its story in music, from the unreleased material of R U Still Down? to the archives unearthed since, and in images, through the documentaries that revisit those years. The acting career stopped dead. What remains of it is enough to measure the loss.

#cinéma#gridlock'd#above the rim#gang related