12 h 7 déc. 2021 ans - CITY OF LIES Johnny Depp TV Premiere Canal+ France

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[Translated from the original French using Google Translate]

City Of Lies on Canal +: Johnny Depp at the heart of rappers' war

By Constance Jamet

REVIEW - Stayed three years in a drawer, deprived of theatrical release, this cursed film is a thriller about the very real murders of singers Tupac Shakur and Notorious Big. The disgraced actor leads the investigation. At 9 p.m. on the encrypted channel.

A cursed movie. If a feature film deserves such a qualifier, it is the thriller City of Lies, by Brad Furman. Direct intimidation on the set, anonymous phone calls, supposed altercation between his star and a manager, a bankrupt producer... In the wake of #MeToo, his star Johnny Depp, accused of domestic violence, has definitely become persona non grata in Hollywood. Even though the project was funded in 2016 on his name. As a result, this return to the rivalry and the murder of the emblematic rappers of the East Coast and the West Coast Tupac Shakur and Notorious BIG in the mid-1990s was not released in theaters. The film had to wait three years before being entitled to a premiere at the Deauville American Film Festival and then an exclusive broadcast on Canal+.

For some, this passage through oblivion is explained by Johnny Depp's legal antics. For others, we must see the pressure of the Los Angeles police, which City of Lies, based on the investigation of journalist Randall Sullivan, implicates in these two unsolved murders. This thriller is inspired by the theories of Russell Poole, the detective in charge of the investigation at the time, to whom Johnny Depp lends his features, while Forest Whitaker plays Jack Jackson, a fictional version of Randall Sullivan. Russell Poole suspected some California police officers who worked their spare time as bodyguards on behalf of an opposing record company of being complicit in the murder of Notorious BIG or at least covering it up.

Despite its sulphurous reputation, City of Lies is not the failed film that its stealth release suggests. Inspired by the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s and Oliver Stone's conspiracy JFK, Brad Furman (customed to sticky investigations as he had demonstrated with Lincoln Defense, with Matthew McConaughey) gives himself two titan tasks.

A convoluted scenario

On the one hand, explain to neophytes the alliances and enmities of the American rap world, gangrene by the gang war, and on which the tutelary figure of music producer Surge Knight weighs. On the other hand, mastering his temporal back and forth between 1997 and 2015, when the viewer finds a weakened Russell Poole, driven out of the ranks of the police, and questioned by the curious and remorsed Jackson.

The result is a dense and convoluted scenario that can discourage even if Johnny Depp tries to mark the passage of the years with a bedaine and a pronounced lame. Still, City of Lies finely captures the era of time: the deleterious and racist climate that reigns among the police. In 1997, the memories of the riots related to the rattoning suffered by Rodney King, the trial of O. J. Simpsons are still fresh. It is also difficult to remain insensitive to the appearance in his own role of Voletta Wallace, the mother of Notorious BIG, and to his impregnable quest for truth.

Under the direction of Brad Furman, Johnny Depp regains the opportunity to play without artifice and without tiss. After struggling a lot, the filmmaker got the Pirates of the Caribbean star to appear without a hare and without an aging prosthesis to mark Russell Poole's descent into hell. Here is Johnny Depp forced to return to the quintessence of the game, to a sincerity and humility that he had not deployed for a long time. And that it may be difficult to see again soon. Fired from the Harry Potter franchise of Fantastic Beasts, his latest films (En attendant les barbares, Minamata) were only shown at a festival or directly on VOD.

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