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It is New York-New Jersey area, in the time of the dragging Vietnam War. A black man with an Italian-sounding name, Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) inherits a heroin-dealing syndicate from the man whose driver he is. He does the Mafia one better in the Harlem drug trade by going straight to the source, an army general in Southeast Asia, eliminating middlemen and selling higher purity stuff at half the street price. Detective Richie Roberts is an honest cop whose popularity among his peers zooms to an all time low when he finds one million unmarked dollars in drug money but turns it in instead of sharing it with the boys as is the accepted practice. Roberts stubbornly follows his nose, identifies Lucas as a primary target, goes after him, and finds out that the biggest block to his chase is right within the police force. He soon discovers that Lucas and cohorts smuggle their contraband in military planes carrying the coffins of dead soldiers from Vietnam back to the United States.
Your interest in this 157-minute gangster thriller drama is sustained principally by the performances of two Oscar winners (Crowe and Washington). They do not come face to face until way towards the end of the film where honest cop confronts crime lord, but their individual stories are developed in a parallel that highlights a stark contrast. The impeccably dressed crime lord (Washington) is cool and smooth, finds himself a sweet yielding wife, gives away turkey on Thanksgiving Day, and takes his mother to church on Sundays—but he can also shoot a cop in cold blood at daytime in full view of everyone, and burn an enemy alive and shoot him to shorten his agony. The honest cop (Crowe) adores his young son but puts work ethics before family despite his wife’s repeated pleas. Unbendable in his pursuit of the truth while burdened with his domestic problem and his peers’ lack of esteem, the Crowe character is understandably scruffy-looking, and physically not in tip-top gladiator shape. Although the Washington character seems more interesting, without the Crowe character there wouldn’t be a story. Director Riddley Scott deftly pulls together this based-on-a-true-story film—so true-to-life that two hours and forty minutes of viewing can already give the viewer a good insight into the murky world of drug dealing.
Far from being another cops-and-robbers story, American Gangster is a morality tale in disguise, although it’s not one where the good guy is good and the bad guy is evil. Thus no one can be called a “hero” or a “villain” for that matter—and that makes for the film’s realism. A good guy who’s all good would be boring, and a bad guy who’s all bad would be too bad to be true, so both would just be caricatures, not real people. It is the curious mix of vice and virtue that adds a piquant touch of reality to the human being, and this mix is emphasized in this movie’s protagonists. Watch yourself when you watch this movie: in the scenes that are hardest to take, that make you flinch, in the sights that rake your guts and create a virtual thunderstorm in your breast—these are the ones that could lead you to moral depths. For its gore, brutality and violence—albeit within the context of the movie—viewing of this film should be limited to adults.
(Date Reviewed: 25 January 2008)
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