Ever since Frank Capra and "The Godfather" movies, Cinema had shattered faith on American politicians and I guess, reality finished the job. And given the requirements of the political thriller genre, dissociating the word 'politician' from the epithet 'crooked' became unconceivable, and Harold Becker's "City Hall" is no exception: the script co-written by three giants: Bo Goldman, Nicholas Pileggi and Paul Schradder, depicts politicians as puppets with money as the strings held by criminals.
The games had its rules and one of them was to never harm, let alone, kill, innocent people. In "Scarface", Tony Montana owed his demise to this principle and Eliott Ness couldn't overlook the explosion that killed a poor little girl in "The Untouchables". "City Hall" opens with an off-duty cop and an in-probation criminal linked to the mob, meeting on a rainy day and shooting at each other. Nothing we're not familiar with, but then there's a stray bullet that takes the film to an unexpected direction, killing a 6-year little boy going to school with his father.
When a bullet kills a child, the community can't close eyes. We know the bullet hasn't finished its trajectory and many other heads will follow. The film is basically about the aftermath of the triple-murder, a thrilling investigation and its political domino-effect. What makes it even more riveting relies on the character who desperately tries to reassemble the pieces of the puzzle: Kevin Calhoun, John Cusack in his 'boyish look' days, as the deputy of an ambitious and charismatic lawyer named John Pappas, played by a Pacino at the top of his game (sometimes over it). Calhoun asks a friend about the killer's probation and what follows is a great piece of dialog. David Paymer's character looks confused. "Isn't the document kosher enough?" "No, it's too kosher." We get the message.
In other words, the Judge let a gangster free while he deserved to be sentenced for jail for more than 10 years. And the 'signal' alert starts ringing when Calhoun discovers that the judge happens to be a friend of John Pappas. Calhoun tries to protect his mentor, little he knows that Pappas will also be revealed as the mastermind of the whole operation. Mastermind is a bit too much; in fact, this is a benign case of political corruption. Then Mobster Zappati wants to spare his nephew a 15-year sentence, he orders his friend, a Brooklyn mayor, named Anselmo, played by a great Danny Aiello to 'persuade the judge', a good friend of John Pappas, which loops the loop. Meanwhile, Anselmo orders to hide 40 000 dollars in the cop's home to imply that he wasn't that clean. Really small potatoes, we've seen worse.
But all of these actions are aggravated by the dramatic turn it took, when a lamb was sacrificed at the altar of political corruption. But more dramatic, even tragic, is the unforgivable turn the film takes as it deliberately screws up the mechanism it confidently built up. It all starts with Bridget Fonda's character as the lawyer representing the cop's widow and struggling to clear her husband's name, in order to get a full pension
well, if it wasn't meant to be a sort of 'romantic' subplot, why a beautiful blonde for that? And this is where the film starts to lose its beat, because there's nothing she brought up that Calhoun couldn't have discovered alone. The whole ride to 'buffalo' was just the set-up to a cringe-worthy ending that didn't even make sense in the first place.
Basically, Fonda is the film's first mistake, and the poster could have done without her. There was so many great moments, a reunion between Anselmo and his business partners, his last conversation with Zapatti which had the same powerful undertones as the unforgettable meeting between Tom Hagen and Frankie Pentangeli in "The Godfather Part II". The film even has the intelligence to spare us some random action scenes, it's all in the mystery surrounding the opening crime, it's one hell of a political whodunit, meaning: who committed the first mistake? And the only character for the film is Calhoun, whose arc will change from idealism to an awareness of the limitation of the political world. If anything, the film had to conclude on a sad and melancholic note.
Instead, we have that upbeat tone at the end, where he campaigns for some candidature I didn't even care about and an exchange of a few wisecracks with Bridget Fonda. That 'bullet killing a child' was the plot device that belonged to "City Hall" and no other film could have used it instead. Imagine the conversation, you know "City Hall"? "City what"? The film where a kid gets killed during a shoot-out and Pacino makes a speech during his funeral." "Yeah, I remember that movie, so
how about it?" "Well, it could have been much better." Unfortunately, the film is so thought-provoking and subversive that some other parts simply didn't work, the ending, Bridget Fonda, and the fact that we're left confused about the future of John Pappas.
It's incredible that a screenplay written by the authors of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'", "Scent of a Woman", "Goodfellas", "Casino", "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull" couldn't come up with a more explosive material. A disappointing collective work, for a film with a very promising concept, a stellar cast, but the conclusion of an ordinary TV movie. That 'bullet killing a child' deserved more. When you have such an original opening, you can't afford such a cheap and ordinary ending, much more one that doesn't even ring true : in other words, this was a man's film.
Indeed, it could have been to political thrillers what "Heat" was to the gangster genre, it could have been even longer, what a waste of performances, especially Aiello who was astonishing.
