American Gangster Movie Review Second Draft

American Gangster Movie ReviewThe 1970’s themed, drug pumped, gangster flick American Gangster shattered its expectations at the box office in November, 2007 opening at $44 million. Denzel Washington stars as the drug kingpin Frank Lucas, who smuggles the purest heroin from Southeast Asia to America in the coffins of fallen soldiers. Lucas brands his stuff “Blue Magic”, and soon enough “Richie Roberts”, Russell Crowe, finds himself trying to nail Lucas and country-folk brothers whom he brought to Harlem from North Carolina to assist him in running his empire. The plot is dramatically intense and will leave you on the edge of your seat or on the brink of tears.

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Washington channels “Scarface” as the gun-happy mobster and compels a powerful performance, deceiving us into loving the bad guy, once again. Washington delivers such a powerful performance that awards are definitely possible. Russell Crowe is Richie Roberts, the “honest” cop from New Jersey, who got his name for commendably turning in 1 million unmarked bills. He too is exceptional, excluding the painfully unnecessary scenes in which we are bored with Roberts’ personal life and essentially baby-momma drama no one paid to see. Rappers T.I., Common, and RZA co-star and they too live up to the standards Washington and Crowe set.

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Yet the film is far from perfect. The movie is long, so long that most theaters provided an intermission for the two hour flick. Also, the movie slightly shifts to Roberts for a few scenes when Lucas is the star of the show and the leading, most important character. 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. 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). “Bumpy Johnson” makes a historical appearance as Lucas’ mentor as well as other prominent mobsters and gangsters of the time.

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Nevertheless, American Gangster is beautifully delivered crime movie which feeds our obsession with bad guys, drugs, and money and is unquestionably a must see and two thumbs up.