16:33 PDT 3/18/2021
in
John DeFore
Brad Furman (‘The Lincoln Lawyer’) directs Johnny Depp and Forest Whitaker in adapting a book about theories that Los Angeles law enforcement officers helped kill The Notorious BIG
Brad Furman’s City of lies, a police officer asking who killed Christopher “Notorious BIG” Wallace, is set almost two decades after that famous murder was thought by many to be unsolvable. Given the lost cause vibe, there is something appropriate about the film’s difficulties in reaching the screens: originally scheduled to be released in 2018, it was shelved amid the rising scandals of costar Johnny Depp – and, some clues, pressure from the LAPD. Depp’s problems only increased in the meantime, to the point that many moviegoers immediately rejected the film. But this is an attractive drama with real-world concerns that shouldn’t be ignored, and it deserves more than being a victim of an actor’s off-screen sins.
Wearing a belly and limping, Depp shows the toll that years of stubbornness took from former LAPD detective Russel Poole without projecting the kind of haunted passion that has become cliché in many archived detective tales. Poole was part of the crime investigation team and, as the film tells (based on Maze, Randall Sullivan’s book on Poole’s theories), he was kicked out of the force for chasing clues that threatened his colleagues. Forest Whitaker, like a journalist who tracks Poole many years after the murder, offers a different energy – the writer driven less by professionalism than by personal curiosity and embarrassment for having misunderstood years ago, when he produced an article claiming that Wallace had rival Tupac Shakur killed.
Whitaker’s Darius Jackson seeks out Poole when he is assigned to a retrospective story on the anniversary of Wallace’s death. Their first date is not auspicious, but what the reporter sees in the retired cop’s apartment – walls full of clues in a mystery he still wants to solve – encourages Jackson to keep coming back. Soon Poole is sharing what he believes, and the film, through numerous flashbacks, is showing how he got angry with his superiors.
The events and players are too complicated to recount here, but Christian Contreras’ script organizes things in a way that makes sense even for a viewer who hasn’t thought much of the mystery in over a decade. The changes he makes to established facts (such as the time of Poole’s promotion to the Robbery / Homicide division) seem to a layman to be innocent changes because of the narrative, not stacking the deck in favor of his protagonist. But make no mistake: the film believes Poole’s theory that some members of the LAPD helped to kill Biggie (a claim that some think was refuted) and that others covered it up. And it sells that narrative convincingly.
Bringing a little bit of Sidney Lumet’s institutional drama to a post-Rodney King Los Angeles, the film’s long flashbacks show the subtle and unsubtle ways in which multiple layers of supervisors discourage the true believer Poole (a second-generation cop who clings to to protect -and-serve ideals) from following inconvenient leads. Hyperconscious of the race since its opening scene, the script suggests that Poole’s bosses (at least one of them openly racist) are afraid of “optics”, urging him to see the “big picture”: after King’s disaster in 1991 , they want all racially sensitive cases to be resolved with as little controversy as possible. They also fear that if word gets out that an officer may be involved in the star’s murder, the lawsuits that follow could (according to Poole) literally bankrupt the city of Los Angeles.
Although it generally takes the form of a procedure to connect the dots, the film finds some opportunities for effective action scenes, including one that predicts the start of the Rampart corruption scandal. Poole finally comes to believe that his department played that scandal because, by burning the land, he ensured that the players in Wallace’s murder were not persecuted for that crime. True or not, it’s probably as close as the film comes to the JFKparanoia thriller style, where the line between outrageous invention and complete plausibility is blurred.
The viewer would have to be very accommodating (or know a lot more about the case than this film explains) in order not to leave Lies feeling that the Wallace case is a shameful – and still correctable, to some extent – example of denied justice. And if the truth can be swept under the rug in such a high-profile murder, how about killing people that no one knows? The final titles state that more than half of the murders with black victims remain unsolved. And that is a shame spreading far, far beyond the boundaries of Los Angeles.
Developer: Good Films
Distributor: Saban Films
Cast: Johnny Depp, Forest Whitaker
Director: Brad Furman
Screenwriter: Christian Contreras
Producers: Paul Brennan, Stuart Manashil, Miriam Segal
Director of photography: Monika Lenczewska
Production designer: Clay Griffith
Costume Designer: Denise Wingate
Publisher: Leo Trombetta
Composer: Chris Hajian
Casting Director: Lauren Gray
R, 111 minutes