Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
11/3/07
Denzel
Washington and Russell Crowe are two of our finest actors, but they come
at it from entirely different angles. Crowe is the leading man as
character actor, trying out whatever accents, mannerisms, postures and
look the role requires. Washington is a Movie Star, a charismatic
force of nature around whom movies shape themselves. Sometimes he's
good, sometimes he's evil, but he's always Denzel Washington, dominating
the screen with his unparalleled confidence. The two have met on-screen
before, in the nifty 1995 curiosity Virtuosity, where Washington
played a tormented cop up against a computerized composite serial killer
named SID 6.7 (Crowe, having a psychotic ball in one of his first Hollywood
roles). Twelve years later, the roles are reversed, and American
Gangster finds Crowe as the cop and Washington as real-life New York
heroin king Frank Lucas. Reuniting with his Gladiator (and,
sadly A Good Year) director Ridley Scott, the former Maximus is
completely convincing as a 70's New York Cop, while Denzel one-ups his
Oscar-winning Training Day villainy by making Lucas one of the most
terrifying movie characters in a long time.
In
the mid-60's, Harlem had been dominated for years by crime boss “Bumpy”
Johnson (Clarence Williams III) when he suddenly dies in the arms of his
driver Frank Lucas (Washington). Meanwhile, good cop Richie Roberts
(Crowe) and his partner (John Hawkes) stumble upon one million dollars
at a crime scene. Richie turns it in, destroying his reputation among
his corruption-riddled coworkers. Back in Harlem, Lucas has a Big
Idea about how to get a leg-up in the struggle to replace Johnson:
he travels to Asia at the height of the Vietnam War and negotiates a deal
to buy heroin directly from the manufacturer. Contacts in the military
will smuggle it out of the country, leaving him to sell a purer product
than his Harlem competitors for less money. He brings an assortment
of family members North from their South Carolina home to serve as his
foot soldiers and builds an efficient and lucrative criminal organization.
Best of all, authorities blinded by racism and the Mafia mystique don't
even realize who he is. As New York begins to crumble under the weight
of an exploding drug problem and runaway police corruption, Roberts is
approached to head an elite Federal unit to bring down the drug bosses.
He and his men struggle to put together an organizational chart, and soon
enough they discover the man at the top of it. Can a small group
of officers bring down the most powerful man in the New York drug trade?
American
Gangster is long (160 minutes) but brisk. It establishes its'
two main characters' parallel tracks and then happily sits back and lets
them play out. I'm not the world's biggest fan of organized crime
movies, but what sets this one apart is the Lucas character. He's
not a typical movie gangster, awash in bling and debauchery but rather
a sociopathic Capitalist who lives The American Dream with a fierce belief
in tradition, family, and killing anyone who crosses him. Washington
slides from upstanding and charming to homicidal on a dime, and at least
one of his violent outbursts actually made me gasp out loud. He's
an utterly terrifying figure, but also fascinating to watch. Scott
is careful not to let him ever become so interesting that we forget how
he's making his money, with brutal and poignant cut-aways to the faceless
junkies being destroyed by his product. Crowe's Richie Roberts, on
the other hand, is an opposite contradiction, a philandering absentee father
who relentlessly does the right thing as his day job. Interesting
actors fill out the cast at every turn, led by the suddenly ubiquitous
Josh Brolin as the most corrupt in a city full of bad cops and Ted Levine
as the one high-ranking officer willing to give Roberts' brand of do-gooding
a chance. Ruby Dee has a couple of standout scenes as Lucas's mother,
happy to turn a blind eye to her family's conversion into drug lords just
as long as the wealth keeps piling up.
Steven
Zaillian's screenplay is rich in motivation and detail about a time of
drug use and casual corruption unfathomable by today's standards, and did
a great job getting just about all the good stuff from Mark
Jacobson's 2000 New York Magazine article upon which the film is based
onto the screen. For this kind of Crime Saga, the story is lean and
doesn't meander much. Scott convincingly transports us back to the
decade of Vietnam and juggles lots of heavily adult material without ever
seeming exploitive. I liked the fact that the film understands the
role race played in the motivation, ascendancy and longevity of Frank Lucas
without ever using it as a crutch. It's rare to find a character
so darkly captivating who never for a moment seems like a good guy, and
it takes a lot of work on both sides of the camera to pull that off.
American
Gangster succeeds both as history lesson (OK, NOW I understand how
New York City got to be so messed up in the 70's), a cautionary tale about
the corrosive power of greed and a pure Good vs. Evil star vehicle.
Whichever side they chose to be on, I'll be happy to watch Denzel Washington
and Russell Crowe go a few more rounds any time they feel like it.
Just make sure Frank Lucas isn't around: even though he's in his
70's and wheelchair-bound, just the fact that that guy is still out there
scares the crap out of me! |
