Arriving as part of a remarkable career hot streak that has yielded Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, Whitney: Can I Be Me, and My Father and Me, Nick Broomfield returns to the subject matter of his acclaimed 2002 investigation Biggie & Tupac.
The timing is poignant. Tupac Shakur should have celebrated his 50th birthday this month. Russell Poole, the LAPD whistleblower who featured prominently in Broomfield’s earlier film (and whose archival interviews prove hugely important throughout Last Man Standing), died in 2015, his career and reputation in tatters. He was reporting new evidence in the Tupac and Biggie cases at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department when he died from an aneurysm. Broomfield hopes this new feature will vindicate Poole, who devoted his later years to gathering evidence that LAPD officers were involved in the hit on Biggie Smalls.
The timing is also convenient. In 2018, Suge Knight, the former CEO of legendary music label Death Row Records – a figure who cast a long and suspicious shadow across Broomfield’s earlier film – was sentenced to 28 years’ imprisonment for manslaughter. Knight’s incarceration allows for never-heard-before testimonies.
“I didn’t want to do interviews for years. It was dangerous to know anything,” says one of several emboldened former Death Row employees.
It’s complicated. The allegation by Poole that the killing of Biggie Smalls was retaliation for the murder of Tupac – and was commissioned by Suge Knight – introduces a circle of corrupt LAPD officers who were all moonlighting as security staff at Death Row Records.
Unholy alliance
The unholy alliance between the police and gang culture was extensive. The daughter of the contemporaneous police chief is found to have gang loyalties in the same Cripps versus Bloods conflict that informed the east coast and west coast rivalries of rap culture during the 1990s.
Last Man Standing goes some way to chronicling how LA’s street gangs impacted upon Death Row’s questionable business practices. The film teases out the many associations between corrupt LA police officers and the record label.
It’s a fascinating addition to the burgeoning sub-genre of Tupac-related documentaries even if one can’t help but feel – given the 70 LAPD officers who were implicated in the Rampart scandal – that this isn’t the entire story. Broomfield’s careful use of a clip from an interview with Knight in which the former executive suggests that Snoop Dogg can only have avoided jail by being involved with the authorities, makes for an intriguing smoking gun and points toward a possible (and welcome) documentary trilogy.
In cinemas and on digital release from July 2nd
