Imagine if “Zodiac” was about Notorious BIG, and instead of Jake Gyllenhaal it stars Johnny Depp, and instead of being good, it is bad.
It’s never a big sign when a real 29-word detective is squeezed into a 112-minute movie, let alone when the real detective is about two of the most notorious unsolved murders in human history, and the film adapted from was directed by Brad Furman (a solid-base hitter who is still looking for another “The Lincoln Lawyer”) and starring Johnny Depp as a retired LAPD detective who says things like “I’m obsessed with the truth, that’s my illness . ” Even if “City of Lies” hadn’t been on the shelf in the past 30 months – its planned release in September 2018 would have been delayed because of a lawsuit that the film’s location manager filed against Depp – it wouldn’t exactly be a big surprise that this badly finished and stretched police thriller was a total waste of the runaway-like wig that Shea Whigham wears on him.
Based on Randall Sullivan’s 2002 book “LAbyrinth: A Detective Investigates the Murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious BIG, the Implication of Death Row Records’ Suge Knight and the origins of the Los Angeles police scandal”, Furman’s film tells the story of, um, all of that. Since “The assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford”, a title has not saved film critics from so many tedious plots. Depp plays a real guy named Russell Poole, and he plays him twice in parallel timelines: once in 1997, when Poole is an unconscious gumshoe who sticks his nose in something that stinks covers the entire DPLA, and another almost 20 years. then when he is an unemployed Miss Havisham in his late 50s cosplaying a detective (with serial killer boards covering his moldy apartment) because he is still haunted by the case that ruined his life.
In theory, Christian Contreras’ time-pinched attack may have contrasted the naivety of a young man who trusted that the LAPD had cleaned up his act after the riots in 92, with the tired obsession of an older man who collapsed in So Much time he’s lucky to have come with a pulse – if not a pension. In practice, “City of Lies” is so understandably oppressed by the vast mystery in its essence that it never finds out what to ask the story or itself. Or how.
The central questions that drive this film are “who killed The Notorious BIG?” “Because?” And “is it really possible that one of the most infamous police departments in American history was … corrupt?” The problem is that the oldest Poole is the first person on Earth to “find out” the answers to the first two – Sullivan’s book, based on Poole’s testimony, said controversially that Suge Knight paid some dirty cops to pull the trigger in retaliation for Tupac’s murder – and the last person on Earth to resolve the third.
Poole’s journey into the bowels of the LAPD begins on the day of BIG’s funeral, when an unrelated road violence incident ends with an undercover white police officer (Shea Whigham) killing the black off-duty police officer (Amin Joseph as Kevin Gaines) who pulled a gun on him at a traffic stop. The details of what happened are not up for discussion – there is evidence to prove that Gaines was following a pattern of aggressive behavior – but the department is still recovering from the double blow of Rodney King’s attack and the OJ trial, and accurately identifies that. like a media storm in the making. Brought to ask questions (but not many), the innocent Poole soon finds out that Gaines’ car is registered with Death Row Records and, like a dog with a bone, he starts digging into the ground even when the police chief makes it clear that he just wants it all to end.
Meanwhile, in the 21st century, a muckraker with his own Biggie-related demons to exorcise is trying to lure the swindler Poole out of the moldy crypt of his own failure (Forest Whitaker plays a fictional journalist named Jack Jackson, probably because “Generic McPlotDevice sounded very Irish for a black character). Whitaker remains one of the most attractive people to whom a camera has ever been aimed, and Furman understands that the actor is never more assistable than when he plays a role that destabilizes his natural gravity with an uncomfortable sense of despair. Jack Jackson may exist only to incite Poole around the world and prove that the LAPD is still racist (let’s say it isn’t), but it’s fun to see him face a strangely humiliated Depp.
The unfortunate artist formerly known as Grindelwald is also mesmerizing in his own way, as the most consistent source of tension in “City of Lies” comes from Depp trying to play someone that a film producer has described as “a cliché of the normal”. This is not exactly the vibe we get here – handcuffed by the lovingly hypocritical approach to the source material about Poole, Depp appears as a closed freak who struggles to reconcile his moral philosophy with the reality of how people behave in the jungle – but there is a fascination of fish pants to see him embody the only sane man in a world that has gone mad. It’s one of the few post-Jack Sparrow performances that makes you regret what the last nine years of Depp’s career could have given us if it weren’t for his decent methodical commitment to public disgrace.
And while the faded star is now old enough to need to be aged for flashbacks instead of aged for “today” scenes, Depp is credible in both timelines; your 90s scenes with Poole’s ultra-pragmatic partner (an excellent Toby Huss) are almost rich enough to forget who you’re watching. And if “City of Lies” had focused exclusively on the role of Poole in preparing for the Rampart scandal – that the film, in its lunar image more like Oliver Stone, frames as a $ 125 million smoke screen to obscure a lawsuit given BIG’s future earnings potential it would have allegedly bankrupted the city of Los Angeles – perhaps it could have worked as a story about the loss of a man’s innocence in the face of a rot too deep to be reformed.
On the other hand, this approach would have meant missing the most powerful scene in the film, in which Voletta Wallace (playing herself) meets Jack in a cafeteria and takes us back to human cost in the center of this corrupted maze. It would also have required “City of Lies” to focus less on what the public doesn’t know about this case than on the more relevant question of why those details were swept under the rug, and Furman’s film lacks the skill or confidence to address the unresolved issues of institutional cancer.
It is implicitly understood that a film directed by the guy who made “Runner Runner” is not going to solve a murder that has hovered over modern American history for more than 20 years – that’s what Sunday night HBO is for. But unlike David Fincher’s “Zodiac”, which is by far the most obvious point of comparison, “City of Lies” does not accept the mystery. He just pretends to be interested in becoming a human drama about the price of obsession, so that he can sink his teeth into all the details of the green hills about the murder of Wallace and the men who allegedly did. There is something admirable about Furman’s attempt to save Poole from the swamp in which he drowned, but “City of Lies” is told with a simplicity that makes this story feel less like an inescapable maze than the kind of maze you can find. at a dinner game table.
Grade: C-
“City of Lies” is already in theaters.
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