Combs discovered the Brooklyn teenager and gave him the option of slinging crack in the streets or slinging raps in the studio. Combs, of course, was also the lone believer in Wallace's talent, and it was Combs - despite the cackles of Wallace's gangsta posse - who suggested Wallace record what would become his soft-tempo anthem, "Juicy."
It was Combs - wouldn't you know - who guided Wallace with life-changing platitudes ("You can't change the world until you change yourself"); it was Combs who gave Wallace the backbone to perform onstage in Los Angeles despite rival Death Row Records crew members lurking in the audience; and it Combs who cradled Wallace in his arms on the way to the hospital after the rapper was shot down in Los Angeles in March 1997.
And it was Combs - oh yes, we could do this all day - who, in an otherwise moving funeral scene, leaned over to mother Voletta Wallace (played by a superb Angela Bassett) and offered to do "anything - anything at all," which leads to Wallace's triumphant casket ride through the streets of Bed-Stuy.
The problem with this telling of Wallace's life is that while the filmmakers are busy making a vanity project, they forget to show why Wallace was such a unique talent and in what cultural context his raps flourished. Some concert scenes suggest the filmmakers were concerned about whether this would be a film you could dance to, which it certainly is. It's also a perfectly serviceable rise-and-fall gangster flick, with all the sepia tone one could hope for.
But it mostly makes a strong case for third-party detachment in story-telling. Perhaps there should be a new artistic commandment, the 15-5 rule: If you want to portray a rapper or artist on the big screen, you've got to wait 15 years from the subject's death, and live at least five degrees of separation from the subject. It'll help limit the hagiography.
In "Notorious," Combs, Voletta Wallace and two of Wallace's former managers serve as producers. Wallace's real-life son plays his father as a nerdy schoolboy. While one scene shows Wallace's violence against wife Faith Evans (and no mention of his arrests for assault), Wallace's transgressions as a human being - selling crack to pregnant women; rampant infidelity; letting a friend take the fall for a weapons charge and a three-year prison stint in Wallace's name - are all meant to show us that while the Big Poppa had his flaws, he was really just an irresistible lug among friends.
(About the whole West Coast-East Coast rivalry thing: According to this film, it was a myth born from Tupac Shakur's paranoia, then perpetuated by the media, and angrily disavowed by both Combs and Wallace. Still, it's a real enough entity to serve as the prime suspect in Wallace's murder.)
Wallace is played straight by first-timer Jamal Woolard, a ringer who gets the mannerisms and nasal huffing correct while portraying the character as a big-time charmer, in the deluxe. Wallace was an honor student with a playful wit, but in his teens turned to drug dealing for nothing more than a sudden "addiction to the paper." There's no sincere explanation for what drove such a good (and apparently doted on) kid to become an angry, pistol-whipping thug, who's relatively ruthless deep into his adulthood.
In a scene meant to show Wallace's growth as a man just before his death, the author of such songs as "Me & My Bitch" sits his young daughter on his lap and orders her to never let a man call her the b-word. It's a rich moment: Did Wallace get to age 24 and father two children before he realized "bitch" was a disrespectful term? Or did the filmmakers have to add that scene to humanize their friend?
Wallace's music surely meant something lasting to his fans. It did more than make people dance, and it was more than an artful examination of "life on the streets," a theme well-mined by rappers long before him. Yet Combs fails to show what made his former employee's rhymes speak to so many.
"My son told stories," Voletta Wallace's character says in a voiceover.
All rappers tell stories. But what was so special about Chris Wallace's, other than they appeared on Combs' record label?
- Justin Berton
"When Bling was Still King"
Though there was little surprise by the end—how could there be?—"Notorious,'' a movie about the life and death of rapper Christopher Wallace (a.k.a. The Notorious B.I.G., a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, a.k.a. Biggie), still managed to stun, unsettle and move me. It's been 11 years since the still-unsolved murder of the hip-hop icon, and the film does a wonderful job of revisiting that dangerous yet creatively rich time in music history. For a hip-hop fiend like me, it's a bittersweet journey to the days when the Cristal was overflowing, the bling was blinding and the performers burned brightly—but briefly. 
The film begins with Wallace as a Catholic-school honor student (portrayed deftly, if a bit eerily, by his son Christopher Wallace Jr.), who gets teased because of his dark skin and his weight. Despite the best efforts of his mother (Angela Bassett), the teenage Biggie ultimately gives in to the kind of peer pressure that turns into an all-too-familiar inner-city tale. He begins to deal drugs, becomes a top crack distributor and ends up in prison, where he focuses on his blossoming rhyming and writing skills. Once he gets out, Wallace (played by Jamal Woolard as an adult) competes in freestyle rap competitions on Brooklyn street corners and comes to the attention of a guy who "knows mother******* who know mother*******" who introduce him to a young producer named Sean (Puffy) Combs (Derek Luke). Watching the actors lip-sync to "Big Poppa'' and "Juicy'' onstage made me still want to bust a move some 10 years later. Along the way, Wallace hooks up with other hip-hop royalty, including Kimberly Jones, who later becomes Lil' Kim. As I watched their dysfunctional partnership on screen, I couldn't help hoping that the end could somehow be different for the Queen Bee, even as I flashed back to the conversations we'd had when she spoke sadly of trying to please Wallace by undergoing plastic surgery to fit his beauty ideal.
Then there's Tupac. "Notorious'' goes to great lengths to emphasize the friendship Tupac Shakur and Wallace shared before bad blood tainted not just their relationship but the entire rap community. Shakur (Anthony Mackie) comes across as the charming and moody man he was, initially celebrating the success of Wallace's first album and giving him tips on dealing with the downside of fame. But a tumultuous marriage to singer Faith Evans, financial responsibilities and his mother's bout with breast cancer all caused Wallace's world to falter. It completely implodes when Shakur is shot and injured in the lobby of a New York record studio and he accuses Smalls (and Combs) of planning it. Seeing Wallace's anguish as Shakur casts him as the bad guy finally gives his fans some insight into the internal turmoil he suffered toward the end of his life.
The rest of the film follows the events and characters (the bicoastal rivalries, the gangs and the records that shared it all with fans) that eventually saw both Shakur and Wallace shot and killed within six months of each other. Smartly, the writers do not delve into suspicions of who killed Wallace; the long and byzantine murder investigation could be its own movie. Instead, "Notorious" highlights a time when hip-hop was arguably at the top of the pop-culture food chain and, not coincidentally, demonstrates why that moment passed with the passing of Wallace and Shakur. That becomes even clearer in the final scene, which features actual footage of Wallace's open hearse being driven through the crowded, cheer- and tear-filled streets of Brooklyn. Watching "Notorious'' was like attending a 10-year high-school reunion and reliving the good old days when the future seemed so bright.
- Allison Samuels
