Critics have said that “American Gangster” is our newest virtuoso crime film. A story skillfully told by director Ridley Scott (“Alien,” “Blade Runner,” “Gladiator”) and cinematographer Harris Savides (“Elephant,” “Zodiac,” “Gerry”), and starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, “American Gangster” just might be our generation’s closest approximation to the 70’s crime epics.
However, this similarity proves to be the film’s greatest flaw. In its attempt to claim space on the Scorsese-Coppola-De Palma staircase, “American Gangster” may be standing too close to its ancestors.
The film, based on real events, centers around heroin dealer Frank Lucas (Washington) and detective Richie Roberts (Crowe). In the power vacuum created by a local kingpin’s death, Lucas steps forward. Apparently fresh out of first-year business school, Lucas sets to constructing his powder-based corporation. Lessons such as economies of scale, product differentiation, and the loss of a middleman result in a business model based on mountains of heroin, Vietnam vets (living and deceased) returning from combat, and slaughter of the competition.
Lucas’s quick climb up the economic ladder, however, quickly places him within the watchful gaze of detective Richie Roberts. Roberts, of course, has his own list of problems: he is in the middle of a nasty custody battle and, apparently, the only honest police officer in the city of New York.
The basic premise fills the viewer in on most of the story, and this predictability also weakens the film. Although suspenseful and expertly made, “American Gangster” still turns out to be exactly what one expects from a really good gangster movie. Everything in the film succeeds, but on the level of a gold star genre picture, with all of its tropes: the gangster kills someone in broad daylight, and, naturally, the cop is getting a divorce.
The film’s strong ties to others before it need not diminish its value, however—only its originality. Full of everything essential to the gangster movie genre, American Gangster can easily stand on its own two legs. And, despite any shortcomings, it still greatly surpasses that last movie running for “new great crime movie” award—that shit hole Miami Vice.
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