There have a couple of surprising incidents of violence that have accompanied the release of Notorious: four people were stabbed at an after-party following the movie’s premiere in New York City, and a shooting at a movie theatre in North Carolina opening weekend. This is surprising for a couple of reasons beyond the obvious. One, I thought all this east coast/west coast stuff was through ages ago; and two, the violence is in stark contradiction to the message of the film. Now I realize that real violence at the movies is all the rage these days, but one would think looking back more than a decade later, the shooting death of two rappers, and the lessons there in, would still be fresh.

Or at the very least it should be when walking out of the movie based on the very subject matter. In Notorious, the bio-pic based upon the life of Christopher Wallace, AKA: the Notorious B.I.G., AKA: Biggie Smalls, a lot of time is spent looking at the then growing dichotomy between rappers of one coast or the other. One important examination is the mentorship Tupac Shakur provided Biggie during his rise to hip-hop success and how that mutual admiration turned sour when Tupac was shot while being robbed on his way to a recording session in New York City. The film plays innocent, which is appropriate because there’s really no evidence to say that Biggie either knew or was involved in the robbery and that it was just a coincidence that Biggie was there that night.

The film, thankfully, makes the important point that the “rap war” was more an invention of the media, then it was truly a battle between rappers to get recording supremacy and the last word… er, I mean, diss. Not that the anger wasn’t real of course, but when it comes to this aspect of Biggie’s story, I found the filmmakers very reflective and very even handed. This makes it so disappointing to see that as they decry the “thug life” philosophy, they also do much to enshrine it as the thing that gave Wallace his shine as an artist. One the one hand, the film doesn’t shy away from Wallace’s alleged philandering with Li’l Kim, whom he “traded up” for Faith Evans later on, only to end up cheating on her too. But then, Biggie’s formative years as a drug dealer are kind of glossed over, as is his subsequent run-ins with the law like the famous March 23rd, 1996 incident outside a Manhattan nightclub.

But the details of Biggie’s life are well known, so what matters is how they’re presented by the actors and the filmmakers. Of the former, newcomer Jamal Woolard does an impressive enough job as Biggie, or at the very lest manages to capture his spirit. I don’t think that the script though gives him a lot of room to stretch as an actor, and the beats he has to hit aren’t necessarily challenging for a novice actor, let alone an experienced one. Anthony Mackie, meanwhile, looked as though he was in doing a bad sketch as Tupac, and in his initial scene it caught me confused as to who he was trying to play. It’s not until he’s identified as Tupac that things clicked, which is not a great sign when you’re playing larger than life figures. In contrast though, Derek Luke easily invokes Sean (then) “Puffy” Combs, right down to his swagger, gestures and pomposity.

As a bio-pic, Notorious is serviceable enough. What it doesn’t deliver though is an emotional resonance beyond the fact that Biggie was killed in his prime, at 24 years of age, on the very cusp of achieving the kind of superstardom he’s been chasing for years. But most stories like this have the “we shall overcome” moment. Think Ray or Walk the Line; a point where the person being biographed is so low that they have no where to go but up. Like the drug addictions of Ray Charles and Johnny Cash; they crashed and had to claw their way back to the perch of fame and success. It’s an interesting comparison seeing that Wallace’s struggles involved overcoming being a drug dealer, though his selfish desires for designer clothes and sneakers afforded to him through the selling of pills on the street corner hardly endear him.

But it’s hard to criticize a movie about someone’s life for presenting the facts in how they lived that life. Director George Tillman Jr. does an adequate job of showing us the life of Christopher Wallace, but the film rarely ever makes an emotional connection or provokes us to care about the life and wasted opportunities of the rapper. His death was sad, truly, especially since he was so young, but this won’t exactly translate across the spectrum outside hip-hop fans. It’s a compelling story, but lacks an emotional wallop that forces us to really care about Biggie as a person as opposed to the fallen icon.