Remember when Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World, a film about the Getty kidnapping, arrived in theaters, only to have the Danny Boyle-produced Trust, an FX series about the Getty kidnapping, arrive hot on its heels? Well, hey, here’s the first trailer for City of Lies, a film that’s solemnly marching over the territory that the USA Network’s Unsolved: The Murders of Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. covered this spring. The USA series starred Bokeem Woodbine, Jimmi Simpson, and Josh Duhamel, among others. This one stars Forest Whitaker and Gellert Grindelwald.
The story, in both cases, is of the based-on-a-true variety. Directed by Brad Furman (The Lincoln Lawyer), City of Lies follows a journalist (Whitaker) and retired LAPD Detective Russell Poole (Johnny Depp) as they try to uncover the identities of those responsible for the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. It’s all very twisty and tense — Whitaker’s journalist character, Jack Jackson, flips a desk at one point; there are many gunshot sounds. Depp’s dour Commissioner Gordon impression diminishes the trailer’s impact somewhat, though perhaps less due to the mustache and the suspicious glances and more due to the fact that it’s Johnny Depp.
“There was only one way this was going to end,” Depp’s detective intones near the end of the trailer. Presumably, the one way it ends is in a city of lies and/or unsolved cases, but we’ll have to wait until September 7th, 2018 to find out. City of Lies is adapted from Randall Sullivan’s LAbyrinth (the film’s previous title) by screenwriter Christian Contreras, and will be released by Global Road Entertainment.
The USA series: Not bad!
