American Gangster

In 1968 when his boss died, Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) took up his organization and began selling drugs making millions of dollars. He apparently did this by traveling to Southeast Asia and negotiating directly with the heroin suppliers. Lucas considers himself a business man and dresses in nice suits and talks about trademarks and holds meetings at diner tables like board meetings, offering up aphoristic advice like Chuck Schwab.

Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe) is a tough, honest cop from New Jersey (seemingly the only honest one) who is charged with a special drug task force. He soon enough has his sights set on Lucas as the most powerful drug lord in New York. Richie's life is in disorder, his ex is suing for custody so she can move to Las Vegas, his fellow cops hate him for his honesty and his child hood friends tend to have become gangsters. Lucas' life is wealthy and privileged beyond what he could imagine.

The story shifts back and forth between Lucas' meteoric rise to power and Richie's near on obsession with getting his man. Directed by Ridley Scott, the film oscillates back and forth between the two in a coherent manner. The trouble is all the skill of Scott, Washington and Crowe can't make this story interesting. I found Richie dull beyond caring and his occasional leaps of logic to progress the investigation are at times out of left field.

Washington fairs a bit better as Lucas, showing an angry brute under all that guise of the gentleman business man. Sadly the overbearing theme of him as a triumph of black enterprise (despite the fact that he is a criminal) is a bit much. But ignoring the blatant mythologizing of Lucas with only the occasional touchstone of reminding people that he is responsible for thousands of dead junkies and several murders not to mention essentially desecrating the corpses of American service men, there isn't much interesting in his story.

As far as gangster films go, it doesn't do anything new or treat in a unique way its subject matter. It seems happier mimicking the seventies classics like "Godfather" or "The French Connection." Reviewers have touted out the confrontation between Crowe and Washington near movie's end as a great cinematic moment often drawing comparisons to Pacino and DeNiro's chat over coffee in "Heat". But frankly I don't see it. In that scene both players new the score and were playing an almost verbal chess. In American Gangster, one side has the clear upper hand.

In fact the film really reaches its end about 25 minutes before it actually ends. Apparently a action packed drug raid was deemed necessary (it isn't). My friend Nick said it was the equivalent of being awake while napping which is pretty good. It takes a long time to get up to speed and once it gets there it almost immediately hits the brakes to slow down before coming to a rest.