CITY HALL (1996)
A Film Review Copyright Dragan Antulov 2003
Attacks on September 11th 2001 showed that great disasters can bring superb leadership skills even from mediocre people. The opposite also may be true - great, skilled and efficient leaders might be brought down by seemingly insignificant incidents. The plot of CITY HALL, 1996 political thriller directed by Harold Becker, begins with one of such incidents - an undercover policeman and small-time drug dealer exchange fire on the street, killing each other just in time when John Pappas (played by Al Pacino), one of the most popular mayors in New York history, fights to bring Democratic Party convention to the city and thus pave way for his own presidential ambitions. Pappas couldn't care less about the shooting, but a 6-year old black child was killed, causing the outrage in the black community. Pappas quickly defuses the tension with skilful speech, but he can't prevent his idealistic deputy Kevin Calhoun (played by John Cusack) from investigating the incident and discovering some details that hint of police corruption. Calhoun, aided by Marybeth Cogan (played by Bridget Fonda), attorney representing policeman's widow, goes even further and discovers that the web of corruption is even greater than he imagined and that includes judges, political bosses and Mafia leaders.
CITY HALL has many things a great film is supposed to have, and that includes interesting subjects and superb cast. What this film doesn't have is a good script, and that may come as a surprise to those accustomed to the works of Paul Schrader and Nicholas Pileggi, two of films's four screenwriters. The reason may very well be in the number of people involved - four screenwriters usually indicates lack of coherent vision. In this case this reflects in poor combination between two genres - political drama and classic thriller. Kevin Lipper, one of the screenwriters, used to be deputy to New York mayor Ed Koch and he is probably responsible for film's most interesting scenes - those that deal with the art of political manipulation, wheeling and dealing without which any modern administration can't work. When CITY HALL leaves such territory, we are left with utterly predictable plot and lame narration by John Cusack's character doesn't help either. Even worse is the finale in which the squeaky-clean protagonist defies his own wisdom and tries to run for office on idealistic principles. The worst of all is the movie's lenghth, unnecessarily increased with the introduction of female attorney's character, probably designed to put some gender diversity in otherwise all-male set of protagonists. On the other hand, director Harold Becker manages to put some coherence in the plot and he is aided by truly great cast, including Al Pacino in one of rare instances where his overacting looks convincing. Jerry Goldsmith's musical score also gives some epic scope to this otherwise unimpressive film. There might be great films about modern American politics - local and otherwise - but CITY HALL is not one of them.
RATING: 4/10 (+)
Review written on January 17th 2003
Dragan Antulov a.k.a. Drax http://film.purger.com - Filmske recenzije na hrvatskom/Movie Reviews in Croatian http://www.purger.com/users/drax/reviews.htm - Movie Reviews in English http://www.ofcs.org - Online Film Critics Society
========== X-RAMR-ID: 33889 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 834338 X-RT-TitleID: 1069924 X-RT-AuthorID: 1307 X-RT-RatingText: 4/10
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews