Stream It Or Skip It: ‘City of Lies’ on VOD, in Which Johnny Depp Plays the Detective Who Investigated Biggie Smalls’ Murder

Now on VOD, City of Lies is one of those movies where the final product might be less interesting than a documentary about its making. It’s a BOATS (Based On A True Story) movie about real-life Los Angeles Police Department detective Russell Poole, who investigated the murder of Biggie Smalls, a.k.a. The Notorious B.I.G.; his allegations that the LAPD was covering up officers’ involvement in the hit were a significant piece of Randall Sullivan’s 2002 nonfiction book LAbyrinth. Playing Poole, Johnny Depp and director Brad Furman (The Lincoln Lawyer, The Infiltrator) shot the film for a 2018 release, which was scuttled indefinitely after a crew member sued Depp for allegedly assaulting him. Some theorize that Depp was used as a scapegoat, and the LAPD, fearing a heap of negative PR and a potential lawsuit from Smalls’ mother, pressured distributors into shelving the movie — a movie which, by the way, indulges even crazier hypotheses. Those distributors faced significant financial fallout and lawsuits of its own for not releasing the film, and it sat on the shelf for two years before Saban Films bought the rights and put it out with minimal fanfare in the middle of a pandemic. So now (pant gasp pant) all we have to do is suss out whether or not it’s worth watching.

CITY OF LIES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Jack Jackson (Forest Whitaker) nabbed the assignment for a Biggie retrospective for the Los Angeles Times. Many years prior, he helmed a TV segment alleging that Biggie called a hit on “rival” rapper Tupac Shakur, an assertion that was more sensational than truthful. It earned him a Peabody Award anyway. Now Jackson knocks on Russell Poole’s (Depp) door, sees it’s open, walks in, stares at a wall full of sticky notes and mugshots tied to Biggie’s murder, then looks down the barrel of a pistol. Don’t worry, animosities are soon smoothed over, and we learn Jackson regrets his award-winning “journalism,” and Poole is perfectly fine with getting some help with an 18-year-old case — an 18-year-old case that remains unsolved, not for lack of trying. Poole is still obsessed with it, at the expense of his family, and his job with the LAPD, who nudged him not particularly gently into a resignation for asking too many questions about the LAPD.

The story leaps between the “present” day in 2015 and 1997, when Poole found compelling links between the beloved rapper’s assassination and the death of an off-duty LAPD officer at the hands of an undercover LAPD cop after a road-rage incident. Poole finds all kinds of loose threads, some attached to the sweater of Suge Knight, one of Biggie’s rivals, owner of Death Row Records and member of the Bloods, a notorious Los Angeles gang. Does Suge have cops on his payroll, perpetrating the crime and covering it up? Poole asks the question because he follows the case where it leads, and you won’t be surprised to learn his superiors don’t take kindly to it.

Poole shares his story with Jackson, who finds himself sucked into the wild conspiracy and the tornado of frustrations swirling around it. He banters with his editor, who wants to squash the story just as it’s getting interesting; he tracks down Poole at the park where he watches from a distance as his estranged son plays minor-league ball. Why has nobody come close to solving Biggie’s murder — or Tupac’s, for that matter? How does the story fit into the broader picture of racism in L.A., and specifically the LAPD? Why is Poole a hermit loner who no one wants to take seriously? Will these questions prompt satisfying answers? Don’t bet on it.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The round-and-round-she-goes vexation of the case exists in the long shadow of Zodiac, then crossed with one of the several zillion movies about LAPD cops, ranging from Heat to Training Day to Rampart to, uh, Stuber. Of course, you also have the muckracking doc Biggie and Tupac, which features the real Poole, and biopics Notorious and All Eyez on Me.

Performance Worth Watching: Depp! Sure, he’s done far more than his share of stunt acting, and his stock has dropped after a multi-car pileup of real-life controversies, priming his late career for a Nicolas Cage-like parade of weird, cheap movies. But in the context of this movie’s vacuum, he’s quite good as Poole, understated and committed to the character; he resists cartoonishizing the detective’s paunch and limp, which feels like a huge feat for the guy who played Whitey Bulger as 90 percent Boston accent.

Memorable Dialogue: Poole: “A white guy shoots and kills a black guy. Who’s at fault?”

Jackson: “Are you threatening me?”

Poole: “No. It’s a riddle. White guy shoots and kills a black guy. Who’s at fault?”

Jackson: “I don’t know!”

Poole: “The answer is, ask more questions.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: City of Lies is a mess, but a compelling mess, and there are surely messier reality-stretching BOATS conspiratorial procedurals that are essentially unthrillers due to their lack of conclusiveness. It’s a dramatically drab walkthrough of fictionalized events occurring at tangents to one of the most upsetting and fascinating unsolved high-profile crimes in recent history, featuring thoughtful performances by a disgraced superstar and a charismatic force in Whitaker. Weird movie; should’ve been weirder, I think.

Furman never gets a handle on all this material — how Tupac’s murder tangles into the plot; the heated discussions of race in the aftermath of OJ Simpson and Rodney King; the boundless corruption of the LAPD; Poole’s wild allegations, oft-discredited, which were given a significant platform in LAbyrinth, which has one hell of an insane subtitle, A Detective Investigates the Murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., the Implication of Death Row Records’ Suge Knight, and the Origins of the Los Angeles Police Scandal. All that stuff is in City of Lies, and it’s all mushed together, a series of asides leaping across decades and presented without the clarity and precision the material demands.

The film’s watchable simply because it’s easy to zero in on Depp and Whitaker’s strong performances — and also because we’re inclined to give a shit about the real-life story well before the movie even existed. Not that we should take any of it as wholesale truth; the Jackson character is a whole-cloth fabrication and narrative device constructed to lend a sympathetic ear to Poole’s crackpot claims, which Depp actually makes less crackpotty. Like I said, weird movie.

Our Call: A marginal SKIP IT for City of Lies, which has its moments — a great scene at the end with Poole, Jackson and Biggie’s mother — but ultimately doesn’t do justice to the story of Biggie’s death, even as a fictionalized work.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream City of Lies