Smackdown!

[October 31st, 2007]

Somewhere in the first hour of American Gangster , Ridley Scott’s camera wanders in on Russell Crowe engaged in energetic copulation with one of his many girlfriends. This woman has a very specific set of instructions: “Oh, Richie,” she moans, “fuck me like a cop, not like a lawyer.” This request, besides prompting an epidemic of performance anxiety in junior associates across the country, is a pointed indication of the movie’s concerns. Richie Roberts will eventually use both police work and legal skills to topple the empire of Denzel Washington’s heroin kingpin Frank Lucas, but the picture doesn’t really have much interest in cops or lawyers. What interests it is raw power, which it handles like a fetish object.

American Gangster is a blunt brick of a movie; neither very stylish nor terribly complex, it still takes 157 minutes to batter home its muscular tale of men who speak softly and carry big guns. Scott has based his film on the true story of Lucas, a man who ran dope directly from Thai poppy fields to Harlem’s 116th Street, and Roberts, who rose in the New Jersey police ranks before trying to take down the New York City drug trade. These are fascinating men—or at least Lucas is; as recently as 2000, he bragged to New York magazine reporter Mark Jacobson how he killed the toughest tough guy in Harlem, in broad daylight, with four shots: “The boy didn’t have no head. The whole shit blowed out back there.” This incident is re-enacted in American Gangster , though it’s less gruesome and somehow less interesting; it shares with the original anecdote a sense of the theatrical, but none of the danger or sickening calculation. As Lucas tells the story, the murder is a perilous gamble that could—and did—pay off with a neighborhood’s awe. As Scott stages it, the killing is simply a display of strength by a man we already know is strong.

That’s the problem with both lead performances: Washington and Crowe both play men of watertight integrity, in their own ways, men whose stolid principles enable them to get what they want. I kept waiting for a tragic flaw to emerge in either character, if only to precipitate a turn in the story, but the heels stood firm, and eventually I realized that this was going to boil down to a test of will between two square-jawed, rather dull strongmen.

Which is exactly how it plays out, although Scott has to ditch a lot of subplots in the final 30 minutes; the supporting characters might have looked significant, but nope, they’re just window dressing on the Lucas and Roberts Show. This means we don’t get any resolution for the intriguing roles, including Lucas’ mother (Ruby Dee, in a wily performance as a woman who is not so easily fooled as she lets on), or even the dull ones, such as rival dealer Nicky Barnes, who comes across as a preening clown (ladies and gentlemen…Mr. Cuba Gooding Jr.!). The lead actors’ showdown commandeers the full spotlight. American Gangster isn’t a dreadful movie—as second-rate crime epics go, it’s perfectly watchable—but it slowly begins to resemble an arm-wrestling match, or a staring contest. By the standards of drama, that isn’t very powerful.