Johnny Depp plays the Los Angeles Police Department detective who hunts for the killer of the rapper The Notorious B.I.G in City of Lies. The first trailer was released on Monday. The movie will be released on September 17.
Brad Furman’s movie, previously titled LAbyrinth, is based on the unsolved murder of the chartbusting rapper in 1997. The Notorious B.I.G (also known as Biggie Smalls; real name Christopher Wallace), was murdered in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles on March 9, 1997. The murder, which followed the killing of rapper Tupac Shakur in a similar manner in September 1996, was blamed variously on corrupt LAPD officers and feuding record labels on the American East and West Coast.
“A murder like that only goes unsolved if the police don’t want to solve it,” Depp’s character, Russell Poole, says in the trailer. Pool teams up with reporter Jack Jackson (Forest Whitaker) to reopen the case two decades later.
The movie is based on Randall Sullivan’s non-fiction book LAbyrinth: A Detective Investigates the Murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G., the Implication of Death Row Records’ Suge Knight, and the Origins of the Los Angeles Police Scandal.
The trailer is cut to the rapper’s You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You) from the album Life After Death.