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Verdict: A music-video treatment of a Hollywood-blockbuster-size life.

By SONIA MURRAY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

One of the two remarkable things in “Tupac: Resurrection,” an underrealized documentary about Tupac Shakur's life, is that he seems to narrate it from the grave.

“I got shot,” he begins, as the camera offers an aerial view of Las Vegas, where the 25-year-old rapper-actor succumbed to bullet wounds he suffered during a drive-by shooting seven years ago.

“I always felt like I would be shot. I was surprised, but I'm happy. . . . Throughout my life, I just wanted to be like an angel for God.”

It isn't until much further along that it becomes clear Shakur is not referring to the 1996 shooting that killed him but to the first time he met with gunfire, at a New York studio in 1994.

But by then, the spooky, “oooh-weee-ooooh” feeling that hangs over this autobiography-of-sorts is thick.

Especially when Shakur makes such past-tense statements as, “I had a prophecy about my death” and “In my life, I was different things to different people.”

Which leads to the other interesting thing about “Tupac: Resurrection”: His life was truly a motion picture just waiting for the wide screen — from his Black Panther mother pregnant with him while she was in prison, to his widely acclaimed efforts in music (the Grammy-nominated “California Love,” multimillion-seller “All Eyez on Me”) and in film (“Juice,” “Poetic Justice”), his community activism, his run-ins with the law and, finally, his still unsolved murder.

It's unfortunate that his cinematic life is told with a collage of such static, uninvolving devices as scrapbook photos, journal entries, stock footage and oft-seen MTV interviews (surely in ample supply, with MTV Films as a production partner. In any case, this is definitely an ''official'' biography, as it's co-executive produced by Tupac's mother, part-time Atlantan Afeni Shakur).

A few obvious questions — like how Shakur became a rapper — basically go unanswered. We hear about how he learned how to deal with the poverty he grew up in (and in turn developed a knack for acting) by pretending he was part of the well-off Drummond family on TV's “Diff'rent Strokes.” As for his influential music career, one day he was a roadie for Oakland hip-hop group Digital Underground "performing” with a blow-up doll onstage, and the next, he's got a solo deal. Huh?

Stirring as the whole narrative is, such a life might have been better illustrated as a biopic more like Spike Lee's “Malcolm X,” Julie Taymor's “Frida”or Ron Howard's “A Beautiful Mind.”

But the way things have been going, it's a safe bet that Shakur's fans will be greeted with even more movies, music and multimedia offerings about the artist who's produced more CDs dead than alive.

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