“Notorious” Tries To Be Bigger Than Life
Occasionally there are other music-related events that could use the “Last Word” treatment, so we’ve collected the closing lines of reviews for Notorious, the new Notorious B.I.G. biopic. (It’s 55% fresh on RottenTomatoes.com at the time of this writing.)
• “Notorious leaves Biggie on the verge of a maturity that plays like wishful thinking. But even when this ‘authorized’ movie biography makes you long for the ‘explicit’ version, Woolard’s tour de force finds the human details that forged an artist and lets Biggie fly.”[Rolling Stone]
• “So Notorious settles into a curious comfort zone; it’s half pop fable, half naturalistic docudrama. Not a bad movie, but nowhere near as strong as its soundtrack. It does not explain its hero so much as revel in the memory of his many selves, teasing the audience with a promise of intimacy and understanding much as Biggie himself did, but without the same seductive payoff. The film’s tag line could be one of Biggie Smalls’ riddling, irresistible refrains: ‘If you don’t know, now you know.’ ” [New York Times]
• “Wallace’s music surely meant something lasting to his fans. It did more than make people dance, and it was more than an artful examination of “life on the streets,” a theme well-mined by rappers long before him. Yet Combs fails to show what made his former employee’s rhymes speak to so many. ‘My son told stories,’ Voletta Wallace’s character says in a voiceover. All rappers tell stories. But what was so special about Chris Wallace’s, other than they appeared on Combs’ record label?” [SF Chronicle]
• “Yet after so much melodrama, Notorious ends with something real: actual footage of the rapper’s funeral procession slowly weaving through the streets of Brooklyn. For any hip-hop fan who remembers the acute sorrow of that dreary March afternoon, Notorious will feel like a colossal disappointment.” [Washington Post]
• “Through it all are the rhymes and the music, hugely enjoyable in their own right, and the long, large shadow of Biggie. The camera is used to powerful effect here when it takes time to linger on Woolard’s face and let him use his bulk to absorb scenes, making this very, very long film about the rapper’s very short life worth the effort.” [LA Times]
