You know, I like the idea of Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe together in the same picture as much as the next guy, but I am puzzled by the good notices GANGSTER is getting more generally. I found it overlong, an absolute farrago of cliches, and worst of all kind of pointless, more a rote exercise in "let's do a gangster flick" than an actual story that needed telling.

MILD SPOILERS

What it really reminds me of, actually, is an unofficial, softened-up remake of BLACK CAESAR. It's been awhile since I've seen BLACK CAESAR, but isn't there a scene in there where he brings his mother to a house and she asks "whose house is this?" and he beams "why it's YOUR house, ma!"? Because there's sure one in here, is what I'm saying. Plus, more generally, all of those ideas about crime being a "pure" distillation of the American dream, and how racism stops even this, seem at least, ah, "inspired" by BLACK CAESAR.

But Washington's character is softened up too much -- it's only obliquely pointed out how much misery he's caused, in point of fact we only see him dealing misery to other crooks or crooked cops. And the story cuts away to Crowe, losing focus while we meander around on Crowe's domestic problems, job problems, etc. (Too bad, too, because Crowe is really good here, Washington is basically playing himself but Crowe creates and completely inhabits his twitchy, nervous, neurotic cop. It's not Crowe's fault that his story is basically just less interesting than Washington's.) BLACK CAESAR was admirably pure and severe, that's what makes it effective to watch even now.

Well, that and CAESAR just said what it wanted to say. AMERICAN GANGSTER suffers from the now-current Hollywood fault of not wanting to offend anyone. It hints at a lot of things -- about drugs, about the nature of war, about racism, and about race -- but doesn't really develop any of it all that well. It seemingly wants to suggest, for example, that drugs aren't really all that bad, or at least that no matter how bad they are the drug war is worse, but it doesn't ever really come out and say that, because of course if it did it would offend people who think drugs really are pretty bad, so it makes some bows in the direction of "drugs are bad" and all you end up getting is mush, really. Whatever one thinks of the sentiment, better to just come out with it. It just works better aesthetically, and no one's gonna be fooled, anyway. As it stands the whole thing is like I said, kinda pointless.

With a ridiculously great cast -- most of them fairly wasted in throwaway roles -- including Carla Gugino as Neglected Wife, Ruby Dee as Saintly Mother, Armand Assante as Mobster, Ted Levine as Gruff but Fair Boss, Josh Brolin as a slimy cop on the take who's essentially the true bad guy of the piece, and although he's not listed on IMDB, I could swear that was Clarence Williams III as Washington's mentor.

doug

Yup. That definitely was.

AMERICAN GANGSTER is enjoyable, largely due to the incredible cast, even if Russell Crowe is a bit miscast. It's part BLACK CAESAR, with a whole lot of THE GODFATHER thrown in. And an odd choice for Ridley Scott. This is more of a Sidney Lumet kind of film.

I was actually hoping to groove on it as such, based on the previews. Shame about the 'softened' part...

Yeah, and what's interesting about that scene in Larry Cohen's BLACK CAESAR is that Fred Williamson's ma rejects her fancy new house (it's where she had been working as a maid before Fred tossed the rich white inhabitants out of it) because of what her son had become.

Not to derail the thread to a discussion of BLACK CAESAR, but I love that movie, it's my favorite blaxploitation flick, at least of what I've seen.

Williamson and Cohen together manage to give us a very complicated picture of their protagonist. He's a bad guy. Some of the reasons he's bad are explainable and understandable, and the movie certainly explains them to us. He's not completely without merit, and the movie shows us that. But BLACK CAESAR, to my mind, anyway, never makes excuses for it's main character or suggests he's anything more than what he is. A bad guy.

The same can't be said for AMERICAN GANGSTER. There's always a "yeah, but" hovering over the screen. The movie always wants to suggest he's really not that bad, or that if he's that bad, there's all sorts of justifiable reasons why. Which makes Crowe's pursuit look odd. Why go after such an affable, sober, guy?

doug

HA! I was just coming here to post the exact same thing. I thought about Larry Cohen's flick when Washington was sitting talking to Joe Polito.

I really did enjoy the film and felt it covered Lucas pretty well (BET has been running a great documentary series called AMERICAN GANGSTER recently). I am amazed at how they were able to recreate the 60s and 70s so convincingly. And I loved the cast where you could pick out anyone in any little role.

That said, my friends and I did find that the movie relied heavily on famous scenes from other gangster films that are popular to this day. You can spot stuff from THE UNTOUCHABLES, SCARFACE, and GOODFELLAS.

Here is the article on Lucas that AMERICAN GANGSTER is based on:

http://nymag.com/nymag/features/3649/

Interestingly, the article mentions that Lucas took a stab at both acting and producing in the early 70s in the unreleased THE RIPOFF. Talk about a lost treasure!

Having finally caught up with AMERICAN GANGSTER on DVD (the theatrical cut), I was a bit surprised at how watchable it was. I had resigned myself to it being a rather bloated and bland enterprise and was pleased to find it competent on enough levels to make it worth viewing, if not savoring.

AMERICAN GANGSTER has as it’s greatest flaw the fact that it’s all been seen before. The trek into the jungles of Vietnam to procure heroin direct from the source (though one has to admit that it took real balls on the part of the real-life Lucas to pull this off---the man was no joke), bringing in his family and then having to check their potentially destructive impulses, and the corrupting nature of the illegal drug trade has all been done.

Denzel Washington does a decent job, but many of the little acting touches and quirks that were compelling in, say, RICOCHET or TRAINING DAY (banging on his chest when expressing extreme anger or frustration), even his tendency to refer to rivals that he’s none too pleased with as “My man,” has been said and done by him in previous films. One is really left with an actor simply playing a role rather than inhabiting it. Normally that’s not particularly problematic, but when the actor is Denzel Washington and the film is called AMERICAN GANGSTER, one expects the roof to get blown off the sucka’ and it most definitely stays on.

Washington’s tone is, however, suited for the aspect of the film that offers Lucas as a businessman selling a product to a consumer base willing to buy it. The sad truth is that the drug trade is capitalism at its purest and most brutal level, at least in contemporary terms. In that sense, the cool, somewhat aloof manner that Lucas (Washington) has, except when he feels that his team is functioning in a manner threatening toward his business interests, is quite appropriate. It’s therefore more than a little ironic that his one, momentary lapse into ostentatious display of his status, is what sets him on his way to his fall. Equally interesting is the lack of violence among the drug hierarchy or the corrupt cop class when one most expects it. You realize that acting against Frank Lucas is not in their best business interests. A film not based on real-life events would have been much more likely to conclude any conflicts with someone getting shot. The restraint of AMERICAN GANGSTER along these lines is admirable, though one could see how this wouldn’t play well with audiences expecting more throw-down for their buck.

Russell Crowe’s character had his moments and could have had more if the film been able to integrate the on-the-job honesty, the womanizing and his obvious intelligence (he becomes a lawyer) into something that felt organic; you see the parts but never quite get a sense of the whole. The filmmakers must have realized this at some point, hence the speech during child custody proceedings with his wife, in which she explicitly states the how and why of his behavior. It would have been far more compelling to see Crowe integrate those elements into a unified whole and fold them into his performance. Nevertheless, one comes to appreciate how difficult it was to do one’s job if you were unwilling to cross the extremely thin line to the criminal other side.

The biggest question this film leaves me with concerns why Ridley Scott felt the need to make it at all. Nothing new is brought to the gangster agenda, outside of making the business aspects more explicit (the copyright infringement discussion between Lucas and Nicky Barnes --- played by Cuba Gooding Jr. --- was a good moment), and as a film, Scott breaks no ground in terms of the look either. Brett Ratner could have directed this bad-boy under the pseudonym “RIDLEY SCOTT” and no one would have been the wiser. What stylistic flourishes there were seemed self-conscious and ill conceived. Why did Scott introduce the corrrupt agent played by Josh Brolin walking up a staircase, switch to slow motion, and then cut back to regular speed? Did we really need to be cued that this was the REAL bad guy? And who the heck cast the actors standing in for Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali? Did they look anything like the real people?

Ultimately, the greatest achievement of AMERICAN GANGSTER is that you come away from the film wondering what Frank Lucas would have accomplished if he’d been allowed to become a legitimate robber baron.

Nicely put, my man.

I wondered the same thing about GLADIATOR, HANNIBAL, KINGDOM OF HEAVEN and A GOOD YEAR.