12/11/07
American Gangster Movie Review
The 1970’s themed, drug pumped, gangster flick American Gangster shattered its expectations at the box office in November, 2007. Denzel Washington stars as the drug kingpin Frank Lucas, who smuggles purer heroin from Southeast Asia to America in the coffins of fallen soldiers, consequently infuriating the New York Italian mobsters who counsel him. Lucas brands his stuff “Blue Magic”, and soon enough the bodies begin dropping like flies from its potency. Washington channels “Scarface” as the gun-happy mobster and compels a powerful performance, deceiving us into loving the bad guy, once again. Russell Crowe is Richie Roberts, the “honest” cop from New Jersey, who got his name for commendably turning in 1 million unmarked bills. Roberts gets place in charge of a task force focused solely on stopping the established drug trafficking empires in New York City and New Jersey. He soon finds that his target is the supplier of “Blue Magic”. The film illustrates Roberts’ quest to nailing Lucas, his accomplices, and his country brothers from North Carolina that he brought to the City to help move the product in addition to showing Lucas throughout his reign, struggles, and conflicts. Throughout the film, Lucas lives unaware of Roberts, and vice-versa, until he is seen at the Ali-Frazier fight mingling with mobsters, in seats closer than the Mafia, and wearing an extravagant chinchilla coat his wife insisted he’d have (far from the casual and conservative suits he lives in to evade unwanted attention). Lucas learned from his mentor (Bumpy Johnson) everything he knows and carries on the traditions and help in the community, the scene in which he gives out Christmas turkeys on a Harlem city block had everyone rooting for the bad guy. Even more so when enemies try to kill his wife Mrs. Puerto Rico, Eva. But indeed there is a downside. We are exposed to Roberts’ inner conflicts of divorcing his wife and struggling for custody of their son, which is baby-momma drama no one paid to see. Also, the movie is so long that most theaters provided an intermission an hour and a half in. On the bright side, American Gangster is beautifully delivered, including the rappers-turned-actors, and feeds our obsession with bad guys, drugs, and money. Nevertheless, a must see and two thumbs up.
