Almost twenty years ago, fans lost two of the greatest hip-hop acts of all time to violence - drive by shootings in cold blood, just six months apart. If you're a fan of these artists, hip-hop, or the investigation of these murders, then this documentary is absolutely essential for you to see. It's the most controversial story in the history of this genre. I have been following these investigations for over a decade, and am a long time fan. I've been through almost all of the nonsense that has come out over the years, but this is the real deal; the smoking gun. Most documentaries on unsolved crimes are created by people who are looking at cases from the outside in. They might have a source or two at best to bolster a theory, but they usually leave viewers with just conjecture and the mere word of questionable sources. This is without the kind of examination and scrutiny that a court room setting might provide, leaving question to their credibility.
"Murder Rap: Inside the Biggie and Tupac Murders" is different. This is the only documentary I've seen in which a retired detective from the investigation has actually come forward and shared the police investigation files publicly on an open cold case. Greg Kading, who authored the original book of the same name (Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations), came out and revealed all of the important facts regarding the investigation into the murders. It had been determined that Biggie and Tupac were murdered as a result of the infamous feud between Tupac/Suge Knight of Death Row records, and Biggie/Puffy Combs of Bad Boy records. The two opposing camps had affiliated themselves with rival gangs in Los Angeles: The MOB Piru Bloods of Compton and their rivals, the South Side Compton Crips. This began tit-for-tat retaliations, which ultimately resulted in the murders of the two hip-hop stars.
We now have a documentary that brings the contents of that book and the investigation to the screen - and it does not disappoint. While the book is a telling of the whole story of the investigation from Greg Kading's perspective, Murder Rap: Inside the Biggie and Tupac Murders is swift to the point. It wastes no time in presenting the original taped interviews of all of the witnesses involved in the cases. Michael Dorsey, the director, has brought us a documentary that is more clinical in its approach to this intricate story than the other documentaries that have come before it. That said, it still has a couple of emotional moments, the more detached approach is most appropriate for a investigation plagued with conspiracy theories. It briefly goes over how the feud between these two camps began, and the events that unfolded on the nights of the murders. It then quickly moves on to debunking one of the most popular conspiracy theories that fans are familiar with: that dirty LAPD cops were involved in a conspiracy to murder Biggie Smalls at the behest of Suge Knight.
The majority of the documentary deals with what the police investigation yielded through their efforts. This is through the taped interviews of witnesses, and written statements from the original case files. The viewer quickly becomes enlightened to what information and leads the police had at their fingertips for all these years. In both of these cases, the important witnesses would not come forward to talk or cooperate with police. What the documentary reveals publicly for the first time is a controversial and astounding account of the murder of Tupac through a taped confession of one of the suspects - extracted by gang investigation techniques. This lends the confession courtroom level credibility, essentially solving the twenty year old murder case of Tupac.
With Suge Knight as their prime suspect in the conspiracy to have Biggie murdered in retaliation for Tupac, the documentary moves onto Biggie's investigation. Viewers will see how the detectives were also able to extract another confession by using the same approach to the Biggie investigation as they did on the Tupac one.
If you're determined to get more truth surrounding these murders than could be had elsewhere, then this documentary is key no matter what your belief may be. It brings so much evidence and new material to the public that it is invaluable to anybody who's interested. I suspect for almost everyone that these cases will no longer be unsolved, and they will find this documentary to be the most satisfying conclusion to the cases yet. The story is corroborated by a lot of independent witness statements, so for me, it is the most credible account of what happened to these two stars and likely the closest to the truth we will ever know.
8/10
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