A Gangland Story

Washington and Scott pull out the big guns for "American Gangster," however they're mostly shooting blanks.  (Film Review)

by Michael Sean McGowan

The Upside: Competently told story of crime and punishment.

The Downside: Competent isn't the same thing as inspiring, is it?

    It's easy to give Denzel Washington his due as an actor- after all, the man is a blast furnace.  If you sat down to make such a list, few would top him in a roster of actors capable of delivering such a sense of barely-controlled passion, steel-eyed confidence, and austere self-assuredness.  These are traits Washington has developed beyond that of an art to a science, which has served him well in playing characters of similar traits such as Malcolm X.  However, these accolades also hide and highlight a chink in Washington's armor- there's a reason why American Gangster marks only the second time he has set himself up as a villainous counter-point in a film, and why both times onlookers have taken in the sight with the rarified awe of spotting a four-leaf clover. 

    American Gangster means to be Ridley Scott's answer to the rebirthing genre of the crime epic now that directors like Martin Scorsese and Michael Mann (and even arguably newbie Ben Affleck with his masterful Gone Baby Gone) have breathed new life into it.  It's the true account of two men- Frank Lucas (Washington), a protégé of Harlem gangster Bumpy Johnson, who would take the teachings and the mistakes of his former mentor and restructure the drug trade in New York City in the 1960s and 70s by buying pure heroin directly from growers in Southeast Asia.  Lucas' plan: to carry the heroin directly from the fields to the streets, cutting out the layers of middle-men "distributors" (including crooked cops and the Mafia) and creating an economic model of selling pure and cheap that would have free market advocates scrambling.  The other man is Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), an honest cop going to night school to become a lawyer who becomes a pariah to his own brethren when he turns in a stash of unattended drug money.  After all, in an organization where more people are on the take than not, who is more dangerous than the do-gooder who absolutely insists on following the rules?

    Gangster does little new with what it has- it charts the parallel rise of both Lucas and Roberts (Lucas as he becomes the king of the Harlem drug trade, Roberts as his honesty nets him a slot as the top dog of a drug enforcement task force), their troublesome social lives (Roberts may be a good cop, but he's an unabashed womanizer), to the point in which Lucas ends up Roberts' crosshairs as the supplier of "Blue Magic," that ultra-pure product that has every other drug dealer in the city turning their own guns in the direction of Lucas and his family.

    Set up this way, American Gangster should have played as a battle of wills not only between two smart and resource men, but two equally endowed actors, as well.  This is where the film falls short.  I'm going to skip the hyperbole and just say it- there's a reason why Denzel Washington is not usually cast as a bad guy and the reason is prominently on display here.  Washington may be forceful, but the variations and nuances in his performances leave a lot to be desired and as a result we get him not playing Frank Lucas, but playing Frank Lucas as played by Denzel Washington.  Confused?  There's a great line in Get Shorty in which someone says that it never mattered the character John Wayne played, because in every movie he just played John Wayne.  Same thing here- unlike Crowe who reinvents himself with every project to play everything from a gallant British sea captain to a troubled math genius to, here, a somewhat nerdish Jewish cop, there just isn't any distinction with Washington's performance.  It's the same role he's played in everything from Devil in a Blue Dress to last year's snoozer Deja Vu.  And the biggest problem with this is that Washington can not make Lucas someone to be feared.  The few moments where Lucas has to throw his muscle around (a bullet to the head on a street corner, a fairly nasty beat-down during a party) feel like they were added to reminded us that, yes, Lucas is a thug, since Washington himself doesn't exude even the faintest hint of a predatory savageness.  To some, this might not matter, but it's a bit distracting to go through Gangster's three-hour sprawl imagining what Samuel L. Jackson or Don Cheadle could have done with this part.

    I don't mean to paint American Gangster as a failure, because it certainly isn't.  Scott's recreation of the Vietnam era is dead-on, with the same kind of cigarette smoke-choked polyester decadence that brings the era vividly to life.  Steven Zaillian's script is smart and sharp, planting both Roberts and Lucas as altruists of their own stripe: Roberts' white-hot hatred of dirty cops and Lucas' adherence to family as a value to be coveted beyond all else.  It's a sharp pairing of perverse nobility that works most of the time, although the movie lacks the communal and philosophical nature of what Kevin Monahan did with The Departed, but runs into trouble towards the end.  Let's just say that American Gangster seems to let its moral float a bit, and we walk off unsure of exactly who was supposed to be the real villain- a drug lord like Lucas, or corrupt cops like Detective Trupo (an appropriately slimy Josh Brolin), the head of an elite squad of equally on-the-take officers whose duties have mutated less from stopping the drug trade to getting their cut. 

    Is Gangster a let-down?  Given the guns behind it, yes.  The pairing of Crowe and Washington should have been a sight to see, not a gushing imbalance and, for his part, Scott did better at making a tragedy out of the lives of those who manipulate others for money in Matchstick Men.  American Gangster isn't The Godfather, nor is it even Heat- movies that played out to be parables about the angels and demons at work on both sides of the law.  Gangster can't get itself to a vantage point to see its story as anything more than a true crime episode played out on the streets, and the ineffectual resolution only accentuates the feeling that not much has been at stake.  American Gangster is well-qualified, even respectable, but doesn't set its world on fire.   B-