City Hall is one of those hopeful yet ultimately frustrating films that never really delivers toward its potential. It's as if the characters, the plot, and the pacing of the film were kept apart throughout filming, and then only introduced in the editing room.
The film begins with a lackluster conflict, the accidental shooting of a child by a drug dealer with relatives in the NY mob families who looks as if he came directly from Central Casting, and acts just as stiff. Before we even know anything about this character, he's confronted by a possibly corrupt cop ( the entire background motivation and confusion regarding the cop's rational for meeting with the drug dealer alone, without backup and without reporting in first is left completely unresolved...don't look for answers by the end of the film), gunfire is exchanged, and everyone is dead, including the innocent child, who is clearly injected into this formula for nothing more than aesthetic/emotional purposes, and is treated like "cinema-chum", shot dead for instant sympathy by the audience, only to draw in the bigger fish in the water, the primary characters.
On the heels of the shooting, we are introduced to our principles, Al Pacino as the mayor, John Cusack as the deputy mayor, single-handedly managing the entirety of New York. The completely contrived setup of the administration of a city the size of New York being managed, at least from all appearances we are given on screen, by these two characters is beyond laughable...its' insipid. Very little backstory toward the actual operations of a City Hall, the interlying politics required to operate a major city, other than another contrived conversation between Al Pacino and Danny Aiello later in the film regarding quid pro quo negotiations for construction in a borough of the city.
The central plot of the movie springs from the reaction by City Hall to this one shooting incident, as the world is (we suppose) put on temporary pause for days afterward in New York by this event. Cusack abandons his supposed position with City Hall and becomes a knee-jerk Mickey Spilane, trodding beside Bridget Fonda on some half-ass investigation of the politics surrounding the now dead cop, suspected of corruption, and the question of why the drug dealer was ever on the streets in the first place, having been questionably released on parole years before. Everyone phones in their performances, which appears as if everyone approached the movie with high hopes, then got distracted by something better to do, (possibly calling their agents for better scripts once this movie started filming) and just showed up to through with the dialogue.
Numerous gaffs, faux pauxs regarding life in New York, cornball accents by Cusack, Fonda's character operating with the depth of a spring puddle, vanilla backgrounds, boring dialogue ( save Al Pacino's impassioned, yet ultimately weak tirades toward the shooting of James Bone and his personal conversations with Pappas) make for a really unsatisfying film....so much potential for more here.
Avoid it. As much as it pains me to recommend against Al Pacino and John Cusack, actors I really enjoy, City Hall just can't deliver and feels like a TV movie of the week.
Recommendations: Better political play on a national basis in Thirteen Days and the Contender.
