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American Gangster
Reviewed by Theo Michelfeld
Posted: November 5, 2007

When Ridley Scott, Denzel Washington, and Russell Crowe team up to make a movie with an iconic title like American Gangster, we should be forgiven for letting our expectations run a little wild. Scott is the perfectionist behind the original Alien film, as well as the sublimely moody Blade Runner, the brilliantly-staged but somewhat simple-minded Gladiator, and the war film Black Hawk Down, which might be the most exquisitely beautiful bad movie ever made. The man is a true visionary with a few serious shortcomings, but he’s capable of delivering, with any given project, something classic to the screen. And with this new project, a 70s crime saga starring a couple of acting titans, the potential seemed overwhelming. 

But in the end, all the familiar moral territory and calculated myth-making moments yield a result that might better be called “American Gangster Movie.” I’ll be fair and admit that this film has some very compelling qualities. At the very least it provides an interesting history lesson. And, like all Ridley Scott films, it’s easy on the eyes. A few years from now, when it’s playing on commercial television, you won’t likely flip past it. But here and now, American Gangster is disappointing. It tries too hard to rub elbows with its predecessors, the likes of The Godfather, Scarface, and Goodfellas—gangster films that earned a cult following, rather than targeting one.

American Gangster is the true story of Frank Lucas, a Harlem drug kingpin of the early 1970s. Lucas started his career as a driver and collector, but took over Harlem and the New York City heroin market when he began smuggling uncut drugs from Vietnam in the caskets of American GIs. The film is strongest when it simply illustrates the environment Lucas exploited to build his empire. With its portrayal of a world crippled by temptation—from its streets to its police departments to its deployed armies—Ridley Scott very capably sets a stage and tone that rationalizes, from a business standpoint, Frank Lucas’s choices.

What’s missing, though, is an iota of insight into Lucas’s will. Here’s a guy responsible for countless deaths and ruined lives, and yet we never get the sense that his wickedness is anything other than practical. If the point is to portray him as something more or less than human, the tactic backfires. After all, even Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator had personality.

Meanwhile, the same criticism can be made of the film’s other main character, Richie Roberts. Roberts, as the film tells it, was the relentlessly incorruptible police detective who defied the system and the conventional wisdom of the day and brought Frank Lucas to justice. He’s very noble indeed, but, like Lucas, the character seems to be filling a niche rather than living a life. These men react to each situation just like an “American Gangster” and a “Last Honest Cop in the World” ought to, but neither seems driven by, or impacted by, the good and evil forces they supposedly embody. For all of the depth written into these roles, the actors might as well be participating in a television re-enactment.

I suppose I should no longer be surprised to watch a Ridley Scott film that resonates no deeper than the eyeballs. I still tend to give the guy the benefit of the doubt, because, as I said before, he is responsible for the first Alien film. (Please, folks, be aware, I am NOT referring to James Cameron’s oft-preferred non-masterpiece sequel, Aliens.) Alien is a landmark film for many technical and artistic reasons, but it remains a classic primarily because all of its doomed characters feel lived-in. In this instance, Ridley Scott’s humanistic approach was his master stroke. Alien was an outer-space horror film, where an audience would have no reason to expect a centimeter of depth, and yet Ridley chose to love and honor each of his characters before ultimately feeding them to the thing with all the teeth.

American Gangster, meanwhile, has much more in common with Scott’s 2001 war film Black Hawk Down. When I first saw that movie, I thought it was an esthetic masterpiece and a total bore—endless combat and a series of war film clichés. Later I saw a documentary about the event (the film depicts a US military mission in Somalia gone awry) and came to realize the clichés were all meticulous re-enactments of exactly what happened, and that the story was, in fact, amazing and unbelievably harrowing. Scott, for some incomprehensible reason, had drained all of the politics and all of the humanity out of the affair, and treated it all as a logistical challenge. To this day, the results are beautiful to watch, but if you want to be properly amazed, check out Mark Bowden’s book by the same name. It’s an incredible story.

Likewise, the actual story of Frank Lucas and Richie Roberts is probably much more compelling than the film Ridley Scott has made of it. American Gangster is a movie you can see but cannot feel. Even Scott’s painstaking recreation of early 70s New York has a disappointing, non-tactile quality. By comparison, David Fincher’s Zodiac, released earlier this year, delivered a 70s-era San Francisco so vivid and alive it kept me grinning through nearly every frame. With Zodiac in mind, I was actually keen to see what a detail freak like Ridley Scott would do with the same wonderfully evocative decade. But I wasn’t thinking straight. Scott is the guy whose unique visual style almost single-handedly killed the 70s film esthetic. (If you think Blade Runner looks like a music video, know this: It’s the other way around.) Ridley Scott can’t bring back the 70s, any more than Pearl Jam can bring back glam rock. It goes against every fiber in his body. So look to the future, Ridley, will you? It’s where you’ve always belonged.

Copyright © 2007 Theo Michelfeld