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American Gangster

By Louis Boram

American Gangster is the commercially ambitious undertaking of Oscar-winning moviemakers aiming for classic gangster storytelling. The result is a Tinsel-town worthy tale that doesn't create the indelible crime portrait it so eagerly wants to paint. Based on 2000 New York magazine article The Return of Superfly by Mark Jacobson, film follows, from 1968-1975, the true story Shakespearian-like rise and fall of Frank Lucas, a North Carolina native turned Harlem drug kingpin and Detective Richie Roberts (mysteriously never mentioned in Jacobson’s source article?), the straight cop obsessed with bringing down Lucas' dope supplying empire.

Story intro finds Lucas (Denzel Washington, Training Day) mourning the death of his legendary crime boss mentor Bumpy Johnson. After watching newscasts from Vietnam of American soldiers using inexpensive, and highly potent, Asian heroin, Lucas develops an enterprising strategy to reinvent the drug's supply pipeline. He travels to the poppy growing fields of Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle to broker direct distribution from growers, shrewdly subjugating the mafia's French connection suppliers. His trademark 100% pure Blue Magic dope costs half as much as the competition's, is twice as good, and makes him attention-grabbing rich.

Along with the mafia, Detective Roberts (Russell Crowe, Gladiator) is consumed with Lucas. He is a flawed hero cop that will stop at nothing to bring the business savvy, family oriented Lucas down.

Director Ridley Scott's (Gladiator) striving saga drapes the screen with abundant, though superficial, 1970's period-piece devices. It's an homage of sorts to rugged early 1970's antihero crime movies (think The French Connection (1971), Superfly (1972), Black Caesar (1973), Serpico (1973) ) that had audiences ducking inside theaters to witness gritty NYC detectives chasing drug kingpins and crooked cops. These street tough movies blurred cop and criminal morality lines and inspired the derivative American Gangster. Alas, the businesslike Gangster doesn't radiate enough charge to be memorable, allowing its binding energy to reveal a respectable, but tame, movie less than the sum of its professionally written, produced, directed, and acted parts.

The film finds Washington and Crowe delivering incongruous performances. Washington is rousing as the high powered Lucas, though not award caliber. His performance and screen presence, while captivating, are too refined to convince that he is an illiterate and uneducated North Carolina country boy. Surprisingly, Crowe is lackluster here, never wrapping his arms around the policeman’s stereotypically distressed private life in a way that energizes the resolute cop or justifies its laborious equal time portrayal. When the film hits its crescendo one time meeting between Washington and Crowe (they appeared together in Virtuosity, 1995) after the two-hour mark, the face-to-face showdown is anemic thanks in large part to a hiccup in pacing and ineffectual editing. Like Heat (Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, 1995), the much anticipated scene, between two movie stars at the peak of their respective powers, is filmed with deflating intersecting cut away shots not allowing the stars to trade fire in the same camera frame.

Supporting standouts are Ruby Dee's (Jungle Fever) disapproving Mama Lucas and the scene stealing Josh Brolin's (No Country For Old Men) debauched Det. Trupo.

Lb

Grade: C

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