In 1996 Tupac Shakur was fatally wounded in a shooting; the following year Biggie Smalls met the same fate - the world had lost two of the biggest rapping stars of all time. But who killed them? Were they random shootings or was there a conspiracy to murder them? If the latter is the case, who was the culprit? These are the questions documentarian Nick Broomfield set out to answer in 2002s Biggie and Tupac. Broomfield had already established his hard-hitting confrontational documentary style by the time he came to make Biggie and Tupac and he doesn't shy away from his theories - Biggie and Tupac, he asserts, were most likely murdered by Suge Knight, the head of the record label Death Row Records. Based primarily around the theory of ex-L.A.P.D. officer Russell Poole (who also claims that the police were involved in covering up the murders), the documentary interviews a number of Biggie and Tupac's former associates as well as Poole himself. In the closing reel, Broomfield confronts Suge Knight himself, serving a prison sentence, and asks him directly if he was responsible. The denial was inevitable. While Biggie and Tupac was criticised at the time for being a speculative affair drawing on untrustworthy and biased sources to bolster its case, it's still a fascinating look into the seemingly cut-throat side to the music industry, and Nick Broomfield - for all the apparent faults - drives the documentary forward with his commitment to probing as deeply as possible into the subject matter.
