Big Apple big-time blues

My wife wanted to check out this New York City drama because she has a thing for John Cusack. He plays Kevin Calhoun, a Louisiana-born deputy mayor to larger-than-life Manhattan Mayor John Pappas (Al Pacino), who has political ambitions far beyond Gracie Mansion. Calhoun virtually worships Mayor Pappas as a father figure, and dutifully undertakes the damage control when a shootout between a highly-decorated cop and a mob-connected drug dealer leaves both gunmen - and an innocent black child - dead, the whole city outraged. But Calhoun's investigation into the case, specifically why the drug dealer was out on parole, leads to a corrupted ward boss (Danny Aiello), an influenced judge, and an ethical swamp that eventually touches the upstanding Pappas himself, and Calhoun can't support his idol any longer. Here's a well-intentioned, intelligent movie in which the lineup of scriptwriters is almost as big as the superstar actors; Paul Schrader, Bo Goldman, Nicholas Pileggi and Ken Lipper (at least those are the ones credited; who knew how many anonymous scribes got chewed up in the machinery). So you've got occasional high-flown oratory (mostly by Pacino), snappy exchanges (usually between Cusack and lawyer Bridget Fonda), and big-city shop talk obviously meant to make you feel like a fly on the wall of the apex of power in a great metropolis. But the narrative's momentum is pretty low, and waiting for plot developments is pretty much at the level of waiting for the next edition of the NY Times to thump on your doorstep. I recommend the flick, but only guardedly, for the effort and talent that went into it.