YMMV / City Hall

• Ensemble Dark Horse: Affably Evil show tunes-loving Corrupt Politician Frank Anselmo and the Mayor’s Good Is Not Dumb Chief of Staff Abe Goodman tend to be at least as well-remembered as the lead players.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Part of the reason why the movie received mixed reviews from the critics (see So Okay, It's Average below) - after Calhoun finds his boss, the mayor, whom he looked up to, was the one who made the call to Judge Stern to get the drug dealing son of mafia boss Paul Zapatti probation instead of jail, which ended up getting a detective and a six-year-old African-American boy killed, not to mention the ones killed to cover up that fact, he tells the mayor he has to resign in an appropriately somber scene - but at the end, Calhoun is running for city council, he's optimistic, and he flirts again with Cogan. It could have been a case of Life Goes On, but it seems jarring instead.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • John Slattery plays one of Mayor Pappas' bodyguards.
  • Richard Schiff is Larry Schwartz, a probation officer.
  • Nestor Serrano is Detective Santos, the detective who gets killed at the beginning, and Lauren Velez is Elaine Santos, his widow.
• So Okay, It's Average: The movie has a 56% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. As Roger Ebert wrote, "Many of the parts of City Hall are so good that the whole should add up to more, but it doesn't".
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Vinnie Zapatti is the street-smart White Sheep of a mob family who is working with the cops to try and bust some of his relatives and then move on to an honest life, but he gets less than five minutes of screentime.
• Values Resonance: The fact Mayor Pappas goes to meet the father of an African-American boy killed in the crossfire between a detective and drug dealer even though his aides try to talk him out of it, and also goes to his funeral service, when many politicians today seem to back away from something like this (though this may be a Zig-Zagging Trope in that Pappas may feel guilty over the fact he was the one who made the call that allowed the drug dealer to be on the street in the first place instead of being in jail where he belongs.