To flaunt a title such as American Gangster in the turbulent wake of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese might seem like flying to the sun with waxy wings.
So, alas, it proves: though even at 157 minutes it is gritty and tough enough to sustain the tension inherent in the basic ruse-and-counter-ruse plot. And yet the film leads to a conclusion more bizarre the more one ponders it.
The time is the 1960s, heyday of the Mafia's control of New York. "Based on a true story", American Gangster tells of Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), an African-American hood who sees and seizes in the circumstances of his time the opportunity to attain hegemony of the crime kingdom. He is hunted by Richie Richards (Russell Crowe) as a cop at war with in-house corruption as well as the florid mayhem in the streets.
Washington and Crowe would seem to be destined to be radioactive stars - even though the material is abysmally recycled - and part of the pity is that they are not. The script fails to link their characters cohesively and they never really engage in that face-off that ought to be the logical climax. Instead, in their methods and manner they seem oddly, and dully, similar: going through the motions. The film has an unthought-out element.
The Vietnam background - intercut at strategic moments - is a workable hypothesis, since Washington's grand scheme entails travelling to Southeast Asia, buying up the heroin, using a corrupt military to smuggle it into the States, and disseminating it throughout the streets at a truly market-related price that his foes cannot match. Unravelling this knot is Crowe's dedication.
Despite the movie's length, it reflects a hasty pace: to the extent that the various factions scarcely coalesce. There is no shortage of excellent players - Chiwetel Ejiofor, Cuba Gooding jnr, Lymari Nadal, Ruby Dee, Armand Assante and Carla Gugino, among them - but they tend to be crowded out by Crowe and Washington. Nonetheless, they have their moments: Nadal as Washington's wife and Dee as his mother rather unsweetly reveal what's under the stone - their sumptuous, bourgeois, luxurious life is predicated on the death of children in the streets and abrupt, merciless violence.
Do they ever wonder what their affluence is based on? One wonders. Doubtless they have no choice, but this is not satisfactorily examined.
Crowe has been so emblazoned upon public consciousness as the new good-bad boy that to embrace him as an updated Untouchable strains credulity. Scott appears to have realised this and Crowe's marital problems and inner moral struggles are intended to reflect this ambiguity. But Washington simply slips into and out of Crowe's life with a preternatural subtlety that leaves him a little superhuman and sinister even when his contrivances precipitate his downfall.
Here I must question the "moral" - if such it is - of the enterprise. There is never any interrogation of the drug-based society through which Washington and Crowe slither in their nominal pursuit of each other. In an extraordinary moment towards the end, Washington boasts to Crowe that he, Washington, has finally (as it were) attested to his Americanism by defeating all those other minorities and emerging as king of the dung heap. Yes, he has; but what exactly does this prove?
The final scene has Washington emerge from a radically reduced prison sentence to stand dumbstruck at the sounds and imagery of contemporary rap-ridden Harlem: so different to the criminal mise-en-scène in which he made his name and affirmed his (ahem) racial pride. His world has become as superannuated as that of the Mafia. But the moment with its message is gone in a flash.
Ranking the Analysts 2009
Flawless
Slightly flawed
Go on: see it
Don't see it
Demand your money back
