American Gangster
dir. Ridley Scott
2007


"As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster."
- Henry Hill, Goodfellas

"One potato a man eats. A hundred he sells. But a billion? He corners the market."
- Acting Chief of Police Alvin Luther Regency, Tough Guys Don't Dance

"Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?"
- Renton, Trainspotting


In American Gangster, Denzel Washington plays Frank Lucas, a no nonsense freelance pharmaceutical supplier who revolutionizes the Vietnam-era heroin market by shipping directly from the Golden Triangle to the streets of New York/New Jersey.

Pursuing him is Russell Crowe as detective Richie Roberts, a Serpico-esque narcotics officer with a self-destructive fetish for doing his job honestly and well. If the gangsters don't kill him, his fellow officers will.

The bulk of the film has our two protagonists weaving separate threads through the fabric of the east coast drug trade. They are on a collision course, but their first scene together comes somewhere near the two hour mark.

As with Michael Mann's Heat, the story here is more one of contrasts than conflicts. Detective Richie's honesty alienates him from those around him, making him more outlaw than law man. Frank Lucas' economic success inures him to the very society whose laws he's breaking. Neither man is happy and, after almost two hours, they have a cup of coffee together to discuss it.

And it doesn't stop with Heat. Fundamentally, watching American Gangster is a deja vu experience. Every scene seems like a reference to something else: Goodfellas, The French Connection, Serpico, Prince of the City, Casino, The Seven-Ups, New Jack City, Fritz the Cat.

But it would be a mistake to write American Gangster off as merely derivative. It is magnificently derivative. The filmmakers assume that we will recognize the elements that they are borrowing and thus do not feel the need to over explain things like basic law enforcement, police corruption, drug trafficking, the war in Vietnam, etc.

Instead of aping the cliches of the past, they use them as an opportunity to highlight the banality of evil. We've seen all this before. We know it. We recognize it. It's in our DNA. And that makes it all the more horrible.

The contrast is striking against, say, New Jack City. New Jack City is practically a science fiction film, not because it's unrealistic but because the filmmakers felt the need to explain almost every detail of the crack trade and the law enforcement strategy to counter same.

Not so American Gangster. This film leaves it to you to fill in the blanks. The workers in the heroin bagging operation, for example, are naked. We know from New Jack City that this is to discourage theft. This fact is explained in American Gangster, but only offhandedly and well into the film.

In this way, American Gangster feels almost like the various narration-free cuts director of Blade Runner. The original cut of Blade Runner left audiences cold. The story was confusing and the science fiction elements were inadequately explained, so they added a famously annoying Philip Marlowe-esque voice-over track. As the film rose in prominence over the years, it became feasible to remove those training wheels. Moviegoers in 1990 could be trusted to understand the story.

But the flip side to that coin is that, like Blade Runner, American Gangster can leave you cold. Which is to say, the characters and situations are realistic. We get little in the way of high drama, gun waving speeches, high stakes ultimatums and Tony Montana shootouts. The characters simply are who they are.

But cold works for this kind of material. This is not a story about individuals. It's a story about social systems collapsing into one another and two men both pushing into and being pulled by that collapse.

It's easy to blame history on a few hotheads with machine guns and too much coke. It's a lot harder to accept that we came here on the shoulders of businessmen and bureaucrats.

Three stars. Jason Lucas wants to know if you really found a million dollars in unmarked bills and turned it in.