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All Eyez on Me, the big screen biopic of legendary rapper Tupac Shakur, hits cinemas this week.

But initial reviewsdont paint a very flattering picture.

Here arethe most scathing verdicts from critics so far.

In the films favour,Purdom is quick to point outthe uncanny likeness between Tupac and actorDemetrius Shipp Jr.

The spheroid head and brilliant smile; those big, disarming eyes; his granite, tattoo-flecked torso.

He even notes that Shipp looks better than that hologram they marshalled out for Coachella in 2012.

But other areas of the film dont fare so well.

The live performances seem to have been shot in one afternoon in a half-full lunch room, with copious cuts to waving hands and nodding heads taking the place of an actual audience.

Some of this can have an unintentional comic effect: one love scene fades in on the line Lets make this our forever.'

Fear pulls no punches in his bruising take.

You get characters who exist solely to spout exposition and/or infomercial taglines,and the sort of clunky, nuance-free film-making that keeps pushing the Camp-o-meter into the red.

Describing himself as majorly disappointed, the writer notes that any attempt to explore the origins of the rappers extraordinary mixof in-your-face aggression and sensitive hood journalism gets buried under sloppy sentimentality and soap-operatics.

Its biopic-making by numbers, he adds.

All Eyez on Me is rarely more than a faithful adaptation of the rappers Wikipedia entry, says Yoshida.

So fixated on name-checking every footnote of Shakurs public life that there is no space to explore the experience of the man himself.

As with other reviews, Yoshida notes Shipp Jr.s resemblance to the late star, but remarks that the rest of the castarent quite so believable:

Most of the actors turn in TV-movie performances.

More bizarrely: Those playing more recogniseable roles including Jarrett Ellis as Snoop Dogg and Harold House Moore as Dr. Dre are never shown in close-up, and their faces always seem to be obscured by something.

Scott Mendelson presents one of the more unflinching reviews of the lot branding the film a painfully formulaic biopic and artistically unworthy of its subject.

[It is]so concerned with presenting Tupac Shakur in a negative light that it forgets to paint him in an interesting one.

It lacks anything resembling context or insight and little in the way of connective tissue as it hops from one life moment to another.

Perhaps most damningly, Mendelson suggests the film is neither entertaining nor enlightening.

Tupac Shakur deserved better. So do you.

According to this write-up, All Eyez on Me is thekind of hammy take on a stars lifeyoud see on an also-ran music channel nearly 20 years ago.

A number of scenes apparently evoke spoof music biopicWalk Hard, while the screenplay flagrantly riddled with clichs and lazy moments of recognition as any film of this sub genre doesnt seem to help.

There isnt a conversation in the film that isnt weighted with obvious foreshadowing, and by the time he dons his basketball jersey and his chain to enjoy a night on the town in Vegas, Tupac may as well be Lincoln preparing to head to the theatre.

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'Less a Tupac biopic than a pop-up Wikipedia page' the most brutal reviews of All Eyez on Me - iNews