James Belushi and Tupac Shakur Make for an Unexpectedly Compelling Odd Couple in the 1997 Neo-Noir Gang Related
Pac's last movie is a weirdly riveting oddball dark comic thriller.
It’s 2Pac Wednesday at the various components of my online empire. As part of my 1994 project over at Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place, my wonderful patrons chose Above the Rim over Mighty Ducks 2.
Above the Rim reminded me how much I love Tupac Shakur as an actor and a rapper. He just so happened to collaborate with James Belushi, whose complete filmography I am writing up here.
1997’s Gang Related is a deeply strange motion picture. To cite just one of its eccentricities, 2Pac was apparently supposed to provide the film’s soundtrack. Unfortunately, he was murdered shortly after filming and consequently was much too dead to do the job.
Since they couldn’t get the charismatic star of the film to do the music, they got the next best thing: Grateful Dead drummer Micky Hart, who provides a percussive and texture-heavy score.
In the final film he made before his early death Shakur played Detective Jacob "Jake" Rodriguez. He’s a sharply dressed, chain-smoking, gambling-addicted mess of a man who turns to illegal means to pay off his massive gambling debt.
Along with partner Detective Franklin "Frank" Divinci (James Belushi), Jake has been robbing and killing drug dealers on the spurious basis that they’re doing the world a favor and no one will miss them.
They are, unfortunately, correct in their cynicism about both police and human nature. Then, one unfortunate night, they make the mistake of robbing an ostensible drug dealer played by Old School legend Kool Moe Dee, who turns out to be a DEA agent working undercover.
A DEA agent, played by Gary Cole, comes sniffing around Frank and Jake’s precinct, so the dirty cops look for a patsy to go down for the DEA agent's violent demise.
After running through potential scapegoats who all prove unfeasible for one reason or another, they settle on Joe (Dennis Quaid), a scraggly alcoholic who has been living on the streets for years and barely knows who he is or where he is.
He seems to have amnesia, but he also seems to be blackout drunk roughly one hundred percent of the time. The partners do not realize that he is not at all the man that he appears to be and consequently makes for a bad patsy even if he himself thinks that he committed murder.
Frank and Jake are bad in the sense that they are corrupt, greedy, selfish murderers who only care about themselves and their own needs. But they’re also bad in the sense that they’re inept at covering up their crimes.
Gang Related reminded me a lot of Grid’lockd, one of the rapper-actor’s best and least-known films. In Grid’lockd, Shakur and Tim Roth play heroin addicts who desperately want to get clean and turn their lives around, but every honorable gesture backfires and sends them back to square one.
Gang Related and Grid’lockd are both dark comedies about interracial partners who get into trouble, but everything they do to extricate themselves from an impossible situation just makes things worse.
The partners become addicted to killing people. Nobody seemed to mind when the people they were killing were criminals and people at the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, but killing a cop changes everything.
To keep their crimes quiet, the dastardly duo convinces Cynthia Wenn (Lela Rochon), an exotic dancer Frank is sleeping with, to pick Joe out of a lineup as the man she saw murder the DEA agent.
For Frank and Jake, murders are like Lays potato chips: you can’t have just one. Cynthia ends up on the partners’ radar as a potential loose end to be tied up with extreme prejudice.
Gang Related has a ridiculously deep cast for a modestly budgeted Neo-Noir starring James Belushi, but no actor makes as strong an impact as James Earl Jones, who enters late in the proceedings as a high-powered attorney and proceeds to steal the film.
In a grungy realm ruled by self-interest, the lawyer has a regal presence. He has principles, morals, and a very powerful family to represent and protect.
Shakur’s film and music careers overlapped and bled into one another. In movies like Juice, Bullet, and Above the Rim, he played the kind of sociopathic gangstas he rapped about.
In Gang Related, he plays another gangsta, but the gang that he’s repping is the police. Shakur looks fantastic in Gang Related. It’s probably the only movie where he regularly wears a tie. He’s habitually clad in Armani suits, which are a not-so-subtle indication that he’s not exactly satisfied with a modest cop salary.
Frank, meanwhile, dresses like he got all his clothes at one of Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville franchises. He wears a fedora and has deeply unflattering facial hair.
Belushi and Shakur are the oddest of odd couples. One was one of the most beloved and iconic musicians of all time. The other is John Belushi’s less talented brother. Yet they have an unexpectedly strong chemistry predicated on mutual desperation and a common goal: to stay alive and out of jail, even if that means killing others.
There’s a tragic synchronicity in Tupac playing, in his final role, a troubled man of violence who enters a dark, murderous, deadly world with delusional confidence and ends up getting swallowed up by the very darkness he finds so irresistible.
The protagonists in Gang Related are also the villains. That’s a tough trick to pull off commercially because audiences have an innate desire to identify with and root for the film's stars, particularly if they are well-dressed and exceedingly handsome, like Shakur here.
We consequently can’t help but identify with the corrupt cops in the early going but there comes a point when it becomes impossible to see them as anything other than monsters.
Police officers play a major role in 2Pac’s music as racist antagonists intent on destroying him. So it makes sense that when Shakur played a police officer, he was a corrupt cop much worse than the criminals he terrorizes.
Shakur’s death adds an additional element of darkness to a movie rich with moral ambiguity and atmosphere and largely devoid of likable characters.
Gang Related is a curious and off-putting film, but it’s also strangely hypnotic, thanks in no small part to a star whose light would be snuffed out way too soon.