Running time: 157 minutes
Starring: Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Josh Brolin, Lymari Nadal
Rating 7 out of 10
The movies have enjoyed a longtime love affair with gangsters. They cut glamorous and heroic figures with sharp dialogue and sharper wardrobes. It's a subject that has lured many great directors at least one time in their careers. For Ridley Scott, that time is now. The well-crafted, absorbing but protracted American Gangster is based on the true-life story of Frank Lucas who, during the late 1960s and early 70s, was above the mafia in drug trafficking in New York. What makes Lucas' story all the more extraordinary is that he is black. At the film's core are two powerful performances from its Oscar-winning pairing. Denzel Washington plays the smart, ruthless Lucas while Crowe is Richie Roberts, a hard-boiled cop who heads up a special narcotics squad set-up to clean-up New York. With a polished script from Steven Zaillian, American Gangster takes you fully into two opposing worlds, underlying the corruption and integrity that resides in both. In particular it focuses on the strong moral codes that govern the behavior of Lucas and Roberts who cling to certain virtuous principles in the deluded belief they override their other failings.
Following the death of his crime-boss mentor, Lucas establishes himself as a powerful underworld figure. When he starts directly importing pure heroin from the Far East, with the assistance of the US military, and selling his superior product for less than his rivals, he quickly monopolizes the New York drug market, becoming phenomenally wealthy in the process. But with Lucas' Blue Magic brand of high-grade heroin taking a lethal toll on the city's junkies, Roberts is assigned the task of finding out who's behind the influx.
The film parallels the story of both men's private and personal lives, following them on their paths that lead inexorably towards one another. One problem with American Gangster is that at more than two and a half hours, that route is a long and circuitous one. Watching both Washington and Crowe separately is sufficient to a point, but what you yearn for is to see them together. That this moment only arrives late on and then too fleetingly, is as frustrating as it is baffling, especially when the scene is one of the film's best.
In the rich realm of gangster films, American Gangster offers nothing new. It's familiar territory, but nevertheless Lucas' story is a fascinating one and, in such accomplished hands, provides plenty of evidence of why the genre is an enduringly popular one.
Kevin Murphy
