ABBEY STELL
Staff Writer
While it’s your basic sequence of events with good cops rivaling evil crime lords, Godfather aficionados are sure to be satisfied with the recently-released film, “American Gangster.”
The film deserves praise for creativity in casting new light on a subject made for the big screen.
Director Ridley Scott and writer Steve Zaillian embellished the real-life account of the masterminded yet disturbed drug lord Frank Lucas and the “honest” detective Richie Roberts.
Roberts devotes his infamous career to bringing Lucas down in Harlem in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Lucas is played by Denzel Washington (“Remember the Titans,” “Man on Fire”), and Roberts is played by Russell Crowe (“Gladiator,” “A Beautiful Mind”).
After a brief scene of intense, incendiary violence (to be followed by many more), the film sets out to identify Lucas’ goal: to find the purest source of heroin, eliminate the middleman and sell the drug to the people of Harlem for half the price of any other “brand.”
Lucas achieves this early on in the story through “relative” connections with a Vietnam War soldier in Bangkok, who leads him through the jungles to a prime source of heroin.
He makes a deal to contract 100 kilos, then conceives the brilliant idea of smuggling it all back to the United States through soldiers’ coffins.
Thereafter, with his “Blue Magic” — the name junkies ascribe to his much-loved mixture — Lucas becomes the “Robin Hood of Harlem,” in a sick and twisted way.
Lucas, however, is not your average malicious mob boss. He is Black, for one thing — not Italian. Virtually all his clients are Black, too, and he insists on hiding out, disguised on the streets of Harlem to do business face-to-face with them.
Roberts is also not your average, drug-busting detective. He is constantly censured by his suspicious colleagues for displays of integrity and honesty among a corrupt New York police force.
Most commonly mentioned is the famed story of how he stumbled upon $1 million of Lucas’ drug money in the trunk of a car and turned it in rather than keeping it.
Interesting and ironic character developments come to light, as more information is filled in about the backgrounds of the two characters’ lives. The audience discovers that, although Roberts takes pride in his job, he was once a cheating husband and is now a deadbeat dad who doesn’t care that his ex-wife is taking his son away from him and moving to Las Vegas.
This is the opposite of Lucas, who takes his mother to church every Sunday and treats his brothers and business partners to the finest of his fruits.
The audience also comes to sympathize with him once they learn of his warped childhood, in which he witnessed a murderous hate-crime against his 12-year-old cousin.
Both Lucas’ and Roberts’ separate plots continue to develop side by side, almost never intertwining until the very end.
Not surprisingly, both previous Oscar winners, Washington and Crowe deliver exceptional performances. Like Leonardo DiCaprio in “Catch Me If You Can,” Washington depicts an evil villain, one who you root for but can’t understand why. How he pulls off making the audience love a character that deceives his sweet mother, lights a man on fire and kills another with a piano is beyond most people’s imaginations.
Crowe, in particular, sets up two solemn and emotionally intense scenes. One involves his climactic realization that he was a failure as a family man. To tell the second would ruin the movie.
The ending was rushed and disappointing. Then again what is one supposed to expect from a real-life-gangster-story-turned-film that, instead of ending up in a bloody shoot-out, ends in a win-win collaboration?
11-08-2007
