LA COPS GIVEN A TELLING

LOS ANGELES COPS SHOWN IN DARK LIGHT OF MEGOPOLIS

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Director Brad Furman adds to the filmography about the dark sided Los Angeles police department in the investigative crime drama, City of Lies (2021).

Furman shows how internal police department criminality may be the cause of major crme in the Calfiornia city.

City of Lies, starring Johnny Depp and Forest Whitaker,  joins other films in the LA Police Department genre, such as Training Day (2001), starring Denzel Washington and  Ethan Hawke, LA Confidential (1999) starring Russell Crowe and Kim Bassinger, as well as China Town (1974), starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, and Touch of Evil (1958) starring Orson Wells and Charlton Heston.

Furman shows the gritty side of LA by drawing together scenes made from a variety of media including news reel footage, dramatizations that look like reality television, dramatizations that look like documentary scenes and dramatizaton that look like Hollywood production scenes.

The narrative about the killngs of two blockuster rap music artists, Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur, within six months of each other, is made all the more compelling with a background music score and rap music sound tracks.

Depp plays retired police detective Russell Poole.  And Whitaker plays journalist Jack Jackson reprofiling the shootings 20 years on.

Furman intertwines two slow moving narratives to unravel the plot behind the high profile assasinations. One narrative entails the journalist interviewing the retired police detective for the retrospective story, while a second narrative flashes back to the original crime investigation conducted by Depp’s character.

Depp and Whitaker are cast well together with the two sharing some self referential film moments challenging each other to ‘act or die’ on film. And supporting actors have been cast to fit the two lead actors more prominently together in the script.

Depp finds a middle ground between his John Dillinger character in Public Enemies (2009) and Whitey Bulger in Black Mass (2015). 

Whitaker continues on with his compelling character acting, playing the journalist as a down to earth, but determined soft hearted tough guy.

Furman had previosuly directed The Infiltrator (2016) starring Bryan Cranston and Diane Kruger about United States custom officials infiltrating the money laundering operation of Columbian drug lord Pablo Escobar.

The rap icons were part of the collective consciousness at the time, particularly LA popular culture. Furman puts the script together with bits and pieces of the collective consciousness as if recalling the true life story as the audience’s memory recalls real life cultural events in compelling fragments.

Furman does a good job telling the story, but he does not follow through with a more compelling use of the narrative device, nor does he have an obvious enough overall vision for the film. As well, scenes are sometimes a bit flat with traditional camera work and actors finding their mark on stage in front of the camera, instead of being more creative by panning through scenes or transitioning between scenes with the camera moving from one set to the next set.

Popular culture provides the tone and atmosphere for many scenes, but the lack of a narrative device detracts from the effectiveness of the popular culture motive. The scenes occur more as transition scenes rather than scenes compelling the narrative forward.

The script could have been more substantive, balancing how a retired cop and a career journalist would talk to one another with the important issues of race, violence, police corruption and LA culture.

Unfortunately, the film leaves very little of real life resolved, unlike the New York police corruption films, Serpico (1973), starring Al Pacino, and American Gangster (2007), starring Denzel Washington, Russel Crowe, Lymari Nadal and Josh Brolin when the audience is left exhausted and embattled, or at the very least, thought provoked about police forces and internal corruption.

OTC50 has given City of Lies a time exemption for the 2022 OTC50 streaming film festival awards, having been originally produced in 2018 for theatrical release, but the film was shelved until being released by another distribution company on March 19, 2021.

City of Lies is currently streaming in Canada on Apple TV for $2.99.