He plays Spoon, a rapping bass player who’s part of a jazz trio/thruple with keyboardist Stretch (a young Tim Roth) and spoken-word songstress Cookie (an even younger Thandiwe Newton). Before he went to jail, he played the heavy in the 1994 basketball drama Above the Rim, one of the many ’90s Black films whose soundtrack is still more popular than the film.Īlthough Shakur was getting the cold shoulder from Hollywood post-release, he triumphantly got one of the leads in Gridlock’d, playing a role Laurence Fishburne and others passed on. Between a brief jail stint for sexual abuse charges and making music for then-gangsta rap empire Death Row Records, there were a couple of years there when the young MC-who gave impressive performances in Juice (as a murderous teen) and Poetic Justice (as Janet Jackson’s love interest)-didn’t have time to be an on-the-rise thespian. Gridlock’d was supposed to be Shakur’s return to the big screen. (There was also a film he did with Mickey Rourke, a shelved crime flick called Bullet, that went straight to video shortly after his death.) While his final film, the cop thriller Gang Related, wouldn’t get released until later that October, his penultimate, posthumous film Gridlock’d was ready to go that January. This is common in a lot of movies – were they just not talking when the camera was off them? I like to think so.Famed rapper/actor Tupac Shakur (better known as 2Pac), whose life was unfortunately cut short a few months before as a result of gunshot wounds from a drive-by shooting that’s still unsolved to this day, had a couple films that had not yet hit theaters when he died. There is time lapse between some of these cuts, yet the conversation remains unbroken. One last thing of note: I believe that there is one of those scenes in this movie where two characters are talking in an unbroken conversation, despite the fact that we don’t follow them for the duration of the conversation, we cut every time they enter or exit a room. One of the things that Tupac was always concerned about in his music was selling out – he didn’t want to become another Jay-Z, as it were, so the movies he was in were consistently heartfelt and dealt with these urban troubles. From what I can gather based on people like Ice Cube, rappers get to be in one good movie, and then they take on some crap. Tupac as a dramatic actor I think continued to surprise everyone. One of the most memorable scenes for Podcast Co-Host and I was when he orders lunch at some diner. He’s good in everything, but here he plays this pretty wacked out dude with a temper. It’s an entertaining flick, but not quite what I expected. The story is okay, and the plot moves along fairly well. There’s also the sense that perhaps we should be getting angry, as the sympathetic plight of the heroes makes everyone around them a villain. Gridlock’d goes for the laughs, and this creates the juxtaposition to the tragic. The entire city seems to be against them as they try to kick, from the guys behind the desks at clinics and stations to the blaxploitation-esque badguys roaming the streets spraying bullets and snarky one-liners.Įven though the subject matter is serious, it’s been dealt with in more serious terms elsewhere, for example A Scanner Darkly. It’s easy to get addicted, but as we discover, not so easy to get off. It uses substance abuse as a subject to create a satirical world that these two characters must deal with. This is a drug movie, and it isn’t a glorification. They both want to get clean, inspired by the recent hospital trip Thandie Newton’s character had to undergo. They play extremely close friends, where Tim Roth is kind of an aggressive and bumbling idiot, and Tupac is the straight man, a level-headed guy. The highlights here are the performances, and the chemistry between Tim Roth and Tupac Shakur’s characters. In terms of writing and directing, the movie is solid but not particularly interesting, which is odd considering the subject matter and the cast. Gridlock’d is the story of a good premise executed competently. In celebration of Tupac’s birthday today, let’s take a look at one of his final films, Gridlock’d, directed by Vondie Curtis-Hall and starring Tupac Shakur, Tim Roth, and Thandie Newton.
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