City of Lies (2021)

Score: 2 / 5

It just feels like too little too late. Even if it hadn't been shelved for so long, it would have felt late had it been released in 2016 when it was shot. This is partly due to the news specials, documentaries, shows (Unsolved), and movies (All Eyez on Me) that have already covered so much of the same ground: the murders of Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace, The Notorious B.I.G. This movie doesn't add much to the conversation, but I suppose it could act as a reasonably diverting entering point for younger audiences. Unfortunately, it's also not interesting or entertaining enough to make much of a splash, no doubt further hindered by public opinion around its lead actor.

Much like the crime procedurals we're all familiar with by now, Brad Furman's City of Lies (he has also directed The Lincoln Lawyer and The Infiltrator) is arguably more interested in the detective than in the victim or even the mystery. We start with a grizzled Russell Poole (Johnny Depp), a disgraced former LAPD detective still musing over the case that was never solved, meeting with LA Times reporter Jack Jackson (Forest Whitaker). Most of the meat of this movie takes place during flashbacks, as Poole spins his yarn about the initial investigation into Biggie's murder and his actions that led to resigning and losing both his pension and his family.

These flashbacks flesh out a younger Poole as he is first summoned to investigate the fatal shooting of an off-duty Black cop by another white detective. He's pressured to be sensitive, given the LA climate of the decade with Rodney King's murder and the OJ Simpson trial. But evidence arises quickly that the murdered cop had Bloods affiliation; moreover, he was on the payroll of Suge Knight, the head of Death Row Records. It becomes clear that Knight is Poole's primary suspect, and the investigation launches. Its twists and turns lead Poole, burdened too by pressure from oversight, to the brink of a mental breakdown; the case, in his mind, can't be solved because to do so would bring down the entire LAPD. Too many high-level officials have their hands in dirty money and dangerous circles.

The frame story ends, notably, with similar tragedy. Poole, whose ongoing friendship with Biggie's mother Voletta Wallace has seemingly kept him afloat, is reinvigorated, even going to the LA Sheriff's office to reopen the investigation. But a sudden heart attack kills him in a poetically ironic twist. Jackson publishes an article lionizing Poole before resigning what he sees as a hypocritical system of injustice and corruption. After all, almost two decades had passed, and the murders were still officially unsolved. Their seemingly dual obsessions converge on solving the murder, which the titular city is determined to forget about, and they both fail, because ultimately even worthy men can't always beat the system. For a movie that could have had an axe to grind -- and should have, a la Zodiac, perhaps -- this one is just really sad.

Even for someone only marginally familiar with the case specifics, I found the film largely uninteresting, thanks to lackluster and even downright confused direction and writing. Over-written, contrived dialogue causes the actors to gargle on exposition and repeated phrases like "you're off this case" and "unless we're not meant to solve it." Depp is really solid in his role, but almost everyone else feels bewildered or at least phoning it in, and I suspect that big names like Whitaker and Shea Whigham only appear badly due to misdirection. This ineptitude exists on the scene level, but also for the whole picture, as shapeless storytelling blurs the lines between past and present without apparent desire to shed new light, make any argument, or even really honor the characters. It worked hard to appear to be a murder mystery before dovetailing as a police procedural and character study, and finally ends up like a watered down PSA about police corruption and unjust murderous police behavior against people of color. Maybe if the screenplay had chosen a style or focus that would have helped.