John Singleton blasted his way onto the cinematic landscape with his mightily impressive and rightly lauded debut feature, Boyz N The Hood. But that was a looong time ago and to be blunt, the intervening years have not been kind.
Higher Learning, Shaft, 2 Fast 2 Furious and Four Brothers all had their moments and were each serviceable enough in their own right, but there was none of the searing impact of his first outing.
His latest offering is the Taylor Lautner film, Abduction, which has not been terribly well received by the critical fraternity and there is a danger that Singleton will slip further and further into this sort of unambitious mediocrity.
It should be with some measure of cautious optimism therefore that we greet the news of a new project possibly in Singleton’s pipeline. A Tupac Shakur biopic has been knocking around for a while and was originally going to be directed by Antoine Fuqua (of Training Day fame), before he bailed after being unable to find the right actor to cast in the lead role. Singleton meanwhile, has been in talks to direct “Straight Outta Compton”, a film about rap crew (and Dr Dre/Ice Cube springboard) NWA, though he is said to be more interested in the Tupac project.
The Tupac biopic script has been drafted by Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson (who previously worked together to acclaim on Ali and Nixon), but has since been worked on further by Brian Tucker. Singleton is one of the few directors out there who has worked with Tupac, having helmed Poetic Justice, his 1993 follow-up to Boyz, in which Tupac had a role.
Source: Vulture.
