I am puzzled as to why this film currently has a 79% rating at Rottentomatoes, as most film critics see a lot of movies, and American Gangster is only impressive if you have never seen Little Caesar, Serpico, The French Connection, GoodFellas, and especially the Godfather pictures. A better title for the film might be Epic Gangster Movie as it contains pretty every single cliché of the genre.
That opening paragraph makes it look like I am going to trash this movie, but I actually enjoyed it. I must admit I entered the theatre with apprehension. Ridley Scott's last three hour epic, Kingdom of Heaven, was so boring I walked out of theatre. This film is never boring throughout its running time, even though it is at times confusing, and is never original.
The movie is based on a true story (as a title card suspiciously tells us) of a criminal investigation into the mob and it's relations to the corrupt New York Police Department in the 1970's. The NYPD was so corrupt that nearly everyone was being paid off, so it was actually in the cops interest to have a strong mafia presence. A single honest cop named Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe) was recruited by the feds to go after both the corruption and the gangsters themselves. Roberts and his team discover that most of the new heroin is being ingeniously imported from Vietnam by American soldiers by Godfather Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington). Lucas was able to evade suspicion for a long period both because his own business acumen and institutional racism- no one believed a black crime organization could rival the Italians.
And right there I feel I have run out of material for a review because I've basically said everything. The movie is not boring but Scott is clearly trying to make his own Godfather (occasionally borrowing from Coppola's masterpiece scene-for-scene). I wish he had tried his own take with the work, because that might have made for a more interesting movie. There is a level of sophistication here, so the plagiarism is done pretty well, but not enough to fool us.
American Gangster (2007)