Movie Reviews: Broken City and Gangster Squad

I recently saw a couple movies that I DVR'd that are tangentially in the same genre:  Gangster Squad and Broken City.

Gangster Squad.  This story tells the true life story of how LAPD Sgt. John O'Mara (Josh Brolin) brought together a group of fellow police to bring down gangster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn).  Though the movie is based on a true story, it takes a lot of liberties as can be read in the following link.

Mickey Cohen rules Los Angeles.  He has all the top city officials in his back pocket -- well, most of them.  Sgt. O'Mara wants to protect and serve his community.  A young woman arrives in Los Angeles via train.  A man posing as a Hollywood agent approaches her and convinces this young woman to come with him.  The intent is to gang rape her.  Sgt. O'Mara is also at the train station and follows the two all the way to an apartment tower (which if I know my Los Angeles is the apartment tower at Franklin Ave and N. Bronson Ave).  This is Mickey Cohen territory.  Sgt. O'Mara's partner refuses to go in to save the young woman, but Sgt. O'Mara feels it is his duty and into the apartment tower he goes.

Sgt. O'Mara does save the young woman and is soon given the authority to bring down Mickey Cohen.

This is a fun popcorn movie.  If you happened to click on the link that I mention above, you know that a lot more bullets flew in this movie than did in real life.  So one has to realize that you're really just seeing a movie that was inspired by real events and has decided to take a significant amount of liberties.  I did get a kick out of seeing an Officer Darryl Gates (Josh Pence) make a couple appearances.

Broken City.  I tend to enjoy watching movies and television shows that have complex plot lines, but for Broken City I soon found myself lost in the real estate dealings that were flying around as the back story.  Billy Taggart (Mark Wahlberg) murders a known rapist of a 16 year-old girl.  The rapist happened to go free and Taggart took things too far.  Mayor Nicholas Hostetler (Russell Crowe) decides to ignore the evidence, but forces Taggart to resign.
  

Seven years later (Biblical number, no doubt), Mayor Hostetler employs Taggart as a private detective.  His job is to determine if the Mayor's wife, Cathleen Hostetler (Catherine Zeta-Jones), is having an affair.

For me, this movie had too much going on.  This might have made a great HBO television series where a deeper dive could take place, but I think this less than 2 hour movie throws too much at the screen.  There is political corruption.  There is a mayoral race.  Two relationships are falling apart.  This is a movie that you probably need to watch three times to understand all the different story plots, but why would anyone want to do that.