As well as the rappers’ nearest and dearest, he speaks to gang-affiliated bodyguards – still grimly wary but, in some cases, penitent now. What he elicits is a sort of elegy, and a documentary marinated in regret. People evidently like confiding in him, even when they’re surprised to find themselves doing so. As he leans into them, however, he makes these characteristics work for him, rendering himself unthreatening. In this milieu, his strength lies in what could easily be his weakness – his upper-middle-class Englishness and air of underdog amateurism.
There’s privilege in being able to let your guard down, and Broomfield exploits that to the full. Instead, the murders are a means to explore a world with its own mindset and value system.Īs ever, Broomfield’s apparent mildness is his greatest weapon the unsteadily dangled boom mic is mightier than the glock.
The killings themselves were an exercise in tit-for-tat pointlessness the banality of evil. The minutiae of the absurd, lethal beef between Knight and his protege Tupac Shakur on the west coast and Sean “Puffy” Combs and Biggie Smalls on the east now seems too petty to bother explaining. The truly fascinating details in Last Man Standing (BBC Two) aren’t the obvious ones. Accordingly, Bloomfield has returned to America for another poke around inside a double murder case that has seemingly puzzled the finest minds of the LAPD for more than a quarter of a century. People aren’t so scared of Suge Knight any more. He’s 56 now, and while you still wouldn’t trifle with him, that’s the kind of age at which a man might start to regret making so many enemies. After a spell on the outside, he’s now back in prison. What could he possibly do? And yet his charisma and presence were potent.Īlmost two decades on, Knight’s hold on the imagination of those around him has waned. Particularly because Knight – who had been head of Tupac’s record label, Death Row Records, and was accused of being involved in the murder of at least one of the rappers – was in prison at the time and guards were nearby. Mostly for the palpable air of menace exuded by the hulking hip-hop magnate Suge Knight as he prepared to sit down with the mildly flustered documentary-maker. A mid a bleakly compelling film, the climactic scene of Nick Broomfield’s Biggie and Tupac, released in 2002, was particularly memorable.
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