'Notorious': Rapper Biopic Is a B.I.G. Disappointment

Those trailers on YouTube may look promising, but don't believe the hype. "Notorious," a new biopic about the life and death of the Notorious B.I.G., feels like Biggie's Wikipedia page reformatted for the big screen. No era of the iconic Brooklyn rapper's tumultuous 24 years goes untouched, making for a frustrating dash from the playground to the grave, all in under two hours.

The film begins at Biggie's end, with the drive-by gunfire that took his life in 1997. As the bullets fly, Biggie's life flashes before his eyes: from the schoolyard to the streets to fatherhood to jail time to parole to the recording studio to superstardom to the road to . . . well, that's the first half of the movie, anyway.

The timeline picks up during the rapper's grade-school years, where a young Christopher Wallace develops a fascination with the rhymes of Kurtis Blow and the flash of neighborhood street hustlers. Jump ahead to high school and Wallace, played by 33-year-old newcomer Jamal "Gravy" Woolard, has grown up to become a drug dealer himself, raising the hackles of his protective mother Voletta (played Angela Bassett).

Biggie narrates his tale from the grave, getting Woolard's performance off on the wrong foot. It's a cloying device that feels both irksome and condescending, as if we couldn't navigate through this familiar story on our own.

But the rookie actor compensates admirably on-screen, channeling the rapper's imposing physicality, delivering those labored breaths and strolling in that roly-poly gait with the assurance of a fan who clearly did his homework. Woolard, a Brooklyn rapper in his own right, might be most convincing behind the microphone. During the film's few musical interludes, he forsakes lip-syncing, respectably re-creating some of Biggie's most indelible verses.

Too bad he's rapping to such a lousy script. Penned by Reggie Rock Bythewood and Biggie biographer Cheo Hodari Coker, the film's dialogue feels trite throughout. Characters converse exclusively in trailer-ready platitudes, punctuating their more impassioned lines with kisses, slammed doors or slaps across faces.

As Biggie courts singer Faith Evans (Antonique Smith), she asks the rapper, "Are you a bad guy trying to be good or a good guy trying to be bad?" It's the million-dollar question "Notorious" fails to answer. As we dash from episode to episode to episode, Woolard isn't given the time to render a deeper portrait of an artist torn between nihilism and hope.

After Biggie's marriage to Evans, what follows is a music-video-paced race to his life's tragic finish. His mother's fight with breast cancer, his infidelities, his deadly feud with rapper Tupac Shakur all go whizzing by, offering little insight to the events that lead to his murder.

Yet after so much melodrama, "Notorious" does end with something real:

Actual footage of the rapper's funeral procession slowly weaving through the streets of Brooklyn. For any hip-hop fan who remembers the acute sorrow of that dreary March afternoon, "Notorious" will feel like a colossal disappointment.

Notorious (100 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for pervasive language, strong sexuality including dialogue and nudity, and drug content.