Mark Reviews Movies: CITY OF LIES

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 18, 2021

"A case like this only goes unsolved," a retired police detective says, "if the police don't want to solve it." That's the main theory of City of Lies, a fairly effective docudrama that presents the murder of Christopher Wallace, known primarily as the Notorious B.I.G. or Biggie Smalls, as that case the police don't want to solve.

The Los Angeles Police Department could have solved it. That much is clear after director Brad Furman and screenwriter Christian Contreras take us through a pair of re-creations of Wallace's murder. The first plays out as a straightforward flashback, and the second intercuts a scale model of the scene with the flashback footage.

There were multiple eyewitnesses, since Wallace was leaving the after-party of an awards show. The witnesses more or less saw the same things—Wallace's convoy leaving, his car stopping at a traffic light, an SUV pulling up on one side of it, a different vehicle briefly stopping on the other side, multiple gunshots. The car from which the shooting originated was identified to the make, model, and color. The bullet casings recovered from the crime scene pointed to a rare type of ammunition. In theory, it would only take some basic investigative work to piece all of this together.

The film, adapted from Randall Sullivan's non-fiction book LAbyrinth, takes this assertion one step further. The police should have solved Wallace's murder, but for an assortment of reasons, none concerning the law or justice, they didn't.

The result is fascinating and mostly convincing. Furman and Contreras aren't trying to solve the case of Wallace's murder—or, for that matter, the murder of Tupac Shakur, who was killed in another unsolved case six months prior in Las Vegas. People are named. Connections are made. For—one assumes—legal purposes, the specific conclusions are left vague, but by the end, the film has convinced us that, while Wallace's murder may not have been part of some grand conspiracy, the police failure to find the killer or killers pointed to a different, pretty sinister one.

That's a key distinction and one with just enough nuance that the film doesn't come across as throwing conspiracy theories around with wild abandon. Some, of course, will scoff at even the suggestions presented by this story, but that seems like missing the point.

This isn't, after all, a documentary. It may present some facts and a lot of speculation, but the film is, at its heart, a work of fiction, based on a true story. The vital point isn't that we know the truth by the end. It is that we feel some degree of truth in the film's portrayal of the failed investigation into Wallace's murder, the insinuations to which that failure points, and the damage left behind by those failures.

That's where the "drama" part of this docudrama arrives. We meet two characters, both of whom have a professional and personal stake in to looking into Wallace's 1997 almost two decades later. One is Russell Poole (Johnny Depp), a retired L.A. police detective, who kind of fell into the investigation and then fell through it.

The other is Jackson (Forest Whitaker), a journalist. He won a prestigious prize for an article that suggested Shakur's murder was connected to an East Coast-West Coat rivalry—and directly to Wallace.

The writer, an apparently invented character, has had his theory discredited and wants to atone with a retrospective. Russell's own theories have been "officially" discredited, too, but he's not looking for atonement. Far from it, he's still looking for confirmation, which he is certain exists, and accountability, which he doubts will ever come.

The two men meet, share theories, go through Russell's story of the investigation, piece together the threads the former detective uncovered, and find boxes upon boxes of police records with a lot of redacted sections. Some of this, such as the case (involving the killing of one police officer by another in an apparent incident of road rage) that eventually put Russell on the Wallace murder, seems foggy or completely disconnected from the case at hand. Some of it, such as the assertion that the infamous Rampart scandal was little more than a smokescreen to cover up a different kind of corruption, feels like a stretch.

A lot of it, though, rings true in one way or another, particularly the notions that cops will go out of their way to cover for each other, that the specific racial tensions of L.A. in the 1990s led to a lot of police resentment and some suspicious political maneuvers, and that Russell's eventual disgrace within the department was about him looking where other cops didn't want him to be doing so. That's one of the more important parts.

Another is that we believe the two lead characters—their motives, their regrets, their gradual connection in looking for the truth. Jackson's side of it, as a man trying to correct a mistake, makes sense, and there's a scene in which he meets with and apologizes to Wallace's mother (who appears as herself) that's quite touching. Russell, played with quiet determination by Depp, is a man who has moved passed resentment and now lives only with regrets—about what he didn't do, what was done to him, and the family he neglected from his constant hunt for the truth. He is left only with obsession.

City of Lies asks the right questions—not only about Wallace's murder and the failed investigation into it, but also about the bigger implications and cost of those things. It leaves us with a lot of questions worth investigating, too.

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