Potential but Ends Up a Superficial Retelling

Rating: 5/10 (16 March 2016)

I was extremely disappointed by this film. With the Oscar controversy and the snub, I had high hopes. After watching the movie, it didn't deserve to be nominated for any awards. What I think is the bigger controversy, though, is that the writers received a completely undeserved Oscar nomination.
The movie begins amazingly well. The first scene really gives you the setting. The dingy small house, bars on windows, a male dominated society, drug dealings, the militarized police, Compton is bleak. I was excited, I'm in for a gritty edgy story about the controversial pioneers of gangster rap (even if in reality, they aren't so gangster). Then, it was all down hill from here. So what went wrong?
First problem was the script and possibly the editing. Overall, haphazard is the best way to describe the plot. The main focus of the story is the financial dispute between Cube and Eazy-E. However, I felt like the story was more concerned with ticking off all the boxes of things that Dre and Cube wanted to be shown rather than telling a coherent and compelling story - the Bye, Felicia scene, check - Ice Cube trashing a music execs office, check etc. Some scenes in the story come about with little explanation. An example of the careless story telling is how the infamous song, "F*** Tha Police," was handled. That was a hugely controversial song with 1st amendment implications and the challenging of censorship in America. It had so much build up with the police harassment. It leads to a riot and then Cube jokes about Raiders gear and we never hear about "F*** Tha Police" again.
I felt like the poor script was due to the writers being handcuffed by Ice Cube and Dr. Dre who produced the film. They were going to have the story told they way they remembered it and not by an objective third party. Dre and Cube are the "good guys." Even when Cube destroys an execs office, we are supposed to be cheering for him. While his frustration is real, I think a better script would have you wavering between whether he was throwing a tantrum or justified. Dre is literally just there most of the time. He's a producer so he does get some story line. DJ Yella and MC Ren could've been left on the cutting room floor without losing anything. Did they really contribute so little? I looked them up and they are credited as writers on most songs. Eazy-E who is the movies quasi-villain, and not around to tell his side of the story, is even shown to not really be so bad, just misguided by their manager Jerry Heller. It all felt so superficial, like it was only scratching the surface. The characters were flat and one dimensional - these are real people, right? Or maybe I got too hung up on the tone set by the first scene. The last scene also mistakenly thought the movie had stayed in the tone of the first scene. I didn't feel enough chaos for the final word to land with the intended impact.
I found the acting to be mostly sub-par minus the seasoned actor Giamatti. He's good here but it's not his best and I felt like he was a somewhat awkward fit for the role. The acting standout of the cast was Jason Mitchell who played Eazy-E. There really isn't much to say about the directing other than it was passable. Also, the movie was at least a half an hour too long and really dragged in the second half.
In the end, it was typical, bland, biopic fare.