Four Stars, Movie Reviews - Saturday, November 17, 2007 5:17 - 7 Comments

American Gangster (Theaters)

When you have a film produced by Ridley Scott combined with two Academy Award winning actors, its only natural to assume that the film’s success would be guaranteed.

American Gangster certainly did not disappoint me. Although it would be unreasonable to compare this film to classics such as The Godfather or Scarface, I thought it was well executed film, and that both Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe put on Oscar winning type performances.

There were some flaws in the film and parts that could have been omitted to make the movie a bit shorter (the custody battle was one example), but overall the pace of the film was good as was its character development. Personally, I thought it lacked some intensity and action, but I’m guessing that more action would mean less realism, which ultimately may have taken away from the film’s accuracy of the life of Frank Lucas.

Synopsis:

Nobody used to notice Frank Lucas, the quiet driver to one of the inner city’s leading black crime bosses. But when his boss suddenly dies, Frank exploits the opening in the power structure to build his own empire and create his own version of the American Dream. Through ingenuity and a strict business ethic, he comes to rule the inner-city drug trade, flooding the streets with a purer product at a better price. Lucas outplays all of the leading crime syndicates and becomes not only one of the city’s mainline corrupters, but part of its circle of legit civic superstars.

Richie Roberts is an outcast cop close enough to the streets to feel a shift of control in the drug underworld. Roberts believes someone is climbing the rungs above the known Mafia families and starts to suspect that a black power player has come from nowhere to dominate the scene. Both Lucas and Roberts share a rigorous ethical code that sets them apart from their own colleagues, making them lone figures on opposite sides of the law. The destinies of these two men will become intertwined as they approach a confrontation where only one of them can come out on top.

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