City Hall

Director: Harold Becker
Screenplay: Ken Littman, Nicholas Pileggi, Bo Goldman, Paul Schraeder
Starring: John Cusack, Al Pacino, Bridget Fonda, Danny Aiello and Martin Landau John's Review

When I first walked into the video store to find a film to review I was struck by how limited the selection was. After rummaging throught the various 'new' releases I came across City Hall. I hadn't heard much about it, except of course for the all star cast, but that doesn't mean anything. (Check out The Trigger Effect and 2 Days in the Valley) City Hall is confusing, slow and amazingly enough, boring.

The story starts out ok. A New York city cop is involved in a shoot-out with a convicted drug dealer in which a six year-old kid is killed. The media jumps all over the event. Unfortunately for the Mayor, George Pappas (Pacino), the killer had slipped through New York's criminal justice system, and should not have been free. The Mayor then wants the event to go away, so he puts his Deputy Mayor Kevin Calhoun (Cusack) onto the problem. An earnest, silver-tongued Southerner, Calhoun tracks the crime's implications, almost as if he were the detective in charge of the case.

Sounds o.k., if only it were that easy, now every bit of story telling is done through dialogue. Slow, monotonous dialogue. The characters talk about the murder of the innocent six year old for about an hour. Then someone else dies and they talk about that for about a half an hour, until someone else dies and they then talk about that for a half an hour.

Pacino is back in his yelling, hands-waving mode. (much like Tom Cruise's fist clenched yelling mode) Pacino has been so much better in so many of his films, this one was a real dissapointment. Cusack gives his standard, very reliable performances. Landau and Fonda seem to sleep-walk through there roles. The only performance really worth mentioning is Aiello's, who does a great job, once he realizes that the mob wants him dead.

Harold Becker's previous works which include The Onion Field and Sea of Love makes this film way to convoluted and disjointed. It's almost as if Becker was trying to tell 5 different stories at once, with entirely too little time. So he crammed it all together into one lump of a film called City Hall.

Grade: D
 
 

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