American Gangster
Drug-dealing murderers are bad; corrupt cops are worse. That’s the message of this lugubrious, two-hour-and-37-minute movie. Screenwriter Steven Zaillian is becoming a master of self-important Hollywood bloat. Again he proves himself incapable of constructing a taut or engaging plot. The audience is forced to assume that he’s driving toward a confrontation between Harlem drug kingpin Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) and New Jersey detective Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe) simply because he keeps cutting between them. To say he’s telling parallel stories would be giving him too much credit. Plenty of stuff happens in “American Gangster,” but we can’t discern whether any of it is important. Talented supporting actors come and go without making any impression because Zaillian and director Ridley Scott give them so little to play. What was Cuba Gooding Jr. supposed to be up to? I have no idea. There’s a scene where he gets on Frank’s nerves, and that’s about it.
Individual scenes crackle with excitement and tension — how could they not, with Scott and Washington and Crowe involved? These three titans of contemporary cinema neither embarrass nor distinguish themselves. Their work has a hollow sort of competence, because they have nothing to say. “American Gangster” has been criticized, rightly so, for paying lip service to the way Lucas’s pure heroin, imported directly from Southeast Asia in the late 60s and early 70s, decimated the African-American community in Harlem and beyond. Instead, the movie admires Lucas’s ingenuity and forthrightness — a contrast with the corrupt cops who, along with the Mafia, controlled the drug trade before Lucas came along. Ultimately, Lucas’s rejection of this corruption allows him to achieve a measured triumph — and gain the admiration of Roberts. How cute — and how deflatingly small-minded for a movie with such epic aspirations.