Notorious Reviews
Top Critic
Notorious, directed by George Tillman Jr. with a sentimental touch, seems torn.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Hollywood.com
No fire in this tale about one of rap music's most notorious shooting stars.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
MSNBC
What's most annoying about Notorious is that whatever bad thing that Biggie ever does gets paved over by the end of the film.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Fresno Bee
A mostly laudatory account of a young musician's life and career that is calculated to put Wallace in a positive light.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
Washington Times
Though it never quite devolves into pure hagiography, the film's central tale of crack dealer made good is sometimes a little too hokey for its own good.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Daily Telegraph (Australia)
While the script provides ample illustrations of Wallace's tough life, there is not enough focus on what set the recording star apart from his peers or why he became so incredibly popular so quickly.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Critic's Notebook
[An] intermittently entertaining but thoroughly conventional Biggie biopic.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Little White Lies
The inclusion of real-life footage and re-enacted YouTube clips is an interesting idea, but with each awkward stab at a new shooting style, Tillman Jr moves closer towards disgracing his subject with yet another hack job.
News of the World
It's bang-average biopic fodder but fans will enjoy the attention to detail and hearing Biggie tracks on a cinema soundsystem.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Feels like Biggie's Wikipedia page reformatted for the big screen.
Empire Magazine
A hip hop hagiography that plays like a straight-to-TV movie.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Tulsa World
I never bought into the chase-your-dream theme. The dream that Biggie sought was not anything that Martin Luther King would have taken pride in.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
CinemaBlend.com
The untold side of the story haunts the frames of this standard-issue biopic.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Slant Magazine
If there's something praiseworthy about Notorious, it's that it pulls off the remarkable, ignominious feat of making its deceased subject less likeable than one remembers.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
The Scorecard Review
Biggie lived a HUGE life in only 24 years, but this film has two hours and never sells me. Isn't selling what Sean 'Puffy' Combs is supposed to be an expert at?
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/10
As mainstream hip hop becomes ever more predictable, so do the biopics about its stars.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/6
FILMINK (Australia)
Notorious is a pretty standard biopic, and is probably largely compromised. If you've never seen Nick Broomfield's excellent 2002 doco Biggie And Tupac, you'd be better served hunting that down instead.
Urban Cinefile
There is little here to attract anyone but the core fan-base.
Paste Magazine
Notorious sticks pretty well to the actual events of Biggie's life, at least the famous ones, but it has little to say about the man that's not available on his Wikipedia entry.
Full Review
| Original Score: 41/100
