Straight Outta Compton

Straight Outta Compton charts the rise and fall of the seminal 1980s rap group N.W.A., with the movie focusing on the internal strife that inevitably forms between the various members (including O’Shea Jackson Jr.’s Ice Cube, Corey Hawkins’ Dr. Dre, and Jason Mitchell’s Eazy-E). There’s little doubt that Straight Outta Compton fares best in its relatively captivating opening hour, as director F. Gary Gray, working from Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff’s screenplay, does a superb job of establishing the volatile atmosphere in which the characters’ reside – with the constant harassment from the police, though far from subtle, certainly painting an effective picture of the inherent anger that paved the way for N.W.A.’s creation. It’s clear, too, that the film benefits from an expected emphasis on the group’s early recording sessions, as these scenes possess a vitality and electricity that’s awfully tough to resist, which ultimately does ensure that Straight Outta Compton‘s shift into an overlong, plodding second half is especially disappointing. Burdened with a running time of almost two-and-a-half hours (!!!), the movie begins to demonstrably fizzle out somewhere around the midway point – with the focus shifting to a series of padded-out, far-from-essential sequences detailing the growing animosity between Eazy-E and his increasingly alienated band members. (It’s curious that Gray stresses elements of a decidedly uninteresting nature and yet the filmmaker refuses to answer a number of key questions, like how each member got their nickname or when N.W.A. went from playing small shows to selling out arenas.) Straight Outta Compton‘s final stretch consequently suffers from a by-the-numbers-biopic feel that’s mostly been absent from the remainder of the narrative, and it is, in the end, clear that the movie would have benefited from a much, much shorter runtime (ie this is not material that needs or deserves such an epic length).

** out of ****