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American Gangster

/ / / November 2, 2007
   
Cast & Credits
Frank Lucas: Denzel Washington
Richie Roberts: Russell Crowe
Huey Lucas: Chiwetel Ejiofor
Det. Trupo: Josh Brolin
Nicky Barnes: Cuba Gooding Jr.
Moses Jones: RZA
Frank's mother: Ruby Dee
Laurie Roberts: Carla Gugino
Dominic Cattano: Armand Assante
Toback: Ted Levine

Universal presents a film directed by Ridley Scott. Written by Steven Zaillian. Based on an article by Mark Jacobson. Running time: 157 minutes. Rated R (for violence, pervasive drug content and language, nudity and sexuality). Opening today at local theaters.


By Roger Ebert

Apart from the detail that he was a heroin dealer, Frank Lucas' career would be an ideal case study for a business school. "American Gangster" tells his success story. Inheriting a crime empire from his famous boss Bumpy Johnson, he cornered the New York drug trade with admirable capitalist strategies. He personally flew to Southeast Asia to buy his product directly from the suppliers, used an ingenious importing scheme to get it into the United States, and sold it at higher purity and lower cost than anyone else was able to. At the end, he was worth more than $150 million, and got a reduced sentence by cutting a deal to expose three-quarters of the NYPD narcotics officers as corrupt. And he always took his mom to church on Sunday.

Lucas is played by Denzel Washington in another one of those performances where he is affable and smooth on the outside, yet ruthless enough to set an enemy on fire. Here's a detail: As the man goes up in flames, Frank shoots him to put him out of his agony. Now that's merciful. His stubborn antagonist in the picture is a police detective named Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), who gets a very bad reputation in the department. How does he do that? By finding $1 million in drug money -- and turning it in. What the hell kind of a thing is that to do, when the usual practice would be to share it with the boys?

There is something inside Roberts that will not bend, not even when his powerful superior (Josh Brolin) threatens him. He vows to bring down Frank Lucas, and he does, although it isn't easy, and his most troubling opposition comes from within the police. Lucas, the student of the late Bumpy, has a simple credo: Treat people right, keep a low profile, adhere to sound business practices and hand out turkeys on Thanksgiving. He can trust the people who work for him because he pays them very well and many of them are his relatives.

In the movie, at least, Lucas is low-key and soft-spoken. No rings on his fingers, no gold around his neck, no spinners on his hubcaps, with a quiet marriage to a sweet wife and a Brooks Brothers image. It takes the authorities the longest time to figure out who he is, because they can't believe an African American could hijack the Harlem drug trade from the Mafia. The Mafia can't believe it, either, but Frank not only pulls it off, but is still alive at the end.

When it was first announced, Ridley Scott's film was inevitably called "The Black Godfather." Not really. For one thing, it tells two parallel stories, not one, and it really has to, because without Roberts, there would be no story to tell, and Lucas might still be in business.

But that doesn't save us from a stock female character who is becoming increasingly tiresome in the movie, the wife (Carla Gugino) who wants Roberts to choose between his job and his family. Their obligatory scenes together are recycled from a dozen or a hundred other plots, and although we sympathize with her (will they all be targeted for assassination?), we grow restless during her complaints. Roberts' domestic crisis is not what the movie is about.

It is about an extraordinary entrepreneur whose story was told in a New York magazine article by Mark Jacobson. As adapted into a (somewhat fictionalized) screenplay by Steve Zaillian ("Schindler's List"), Lucas is a loyal driver, bodyguard and coat holder for Bumpy Johnson (who has inspired characters in three other movies, including "The Cotton Club"). He listens carefully to Johnson's advice, cradles him when he is dying, then takes over and realizes the fatal flaw in the Harlem drug business: The goods come in through the Mafia, after having been stepped on all along the way.

So he flies to Thailand, goes upriver for a face to face with the general in charge of drugs, and is rewarded for this seemingly foolhardy risk with an exclusive contract. The drugs will come to the United States inside the coffins of American casualties, which is apparently based on fact. It's all arranged by one of his relatives.

In terms of his visible lifestyle, the story of Frank Lucas might as well be the story of J.C. Penney, except that he hands out turkeys instead of pennies. Everyone in his distribution chain is reasonably happy, because the product is high quality, the price is right, and there's money for everyone. Ironically, an epidemic of overdoses occurs when Lucas' high-grade stuff is treated by junkies as if it's the usual weaker street strength. Then Lucas starts practicing what marketing experts call branding: It becomes known that his "Blue Magic" offers twice the potency at half the price, and other suppliers are forced off the streets by the rules of the marketplace, not turf wars.

This is an engrossing story, told smoothly and well, and Russell Crowe's contribution is enormous (it's not his fault his wife complains). Looking like a care-worn bulldog, his Richie Roberts studies for a law degree, remains inviolate in his ethical standards and just keeps plugging away, building his case.

The film ends not with a "Scarface"-style shootout, but with Frank and Richie sitting down for a long, intelligent conversation, written by Zaillian to show two smart men who both know the score. As I hinted above: less "Godfather" than "Wall Street," although for that matter a movie named "American Gangster" could have been made about Kenneth Lay.



At roughly the same time, Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), a real-life Essex County, New Jersey, police detective, and his excitable partner, Javier (Javy) Rivera (John Ortiz), discover about a million dollars in unmarked bills in the trunk of a car. Javy reasons that the money has been lifted by a cop during a drug bust, so if he and Richie turn it in they will, in effect, be turning a cop in. Javy is a junkie and a liar, but his logic in this case is impeccable. (We later discover, in an intertextual flourish, that the money may be linked to the French Connection.) Ignoring Javy, Richie counts out the bills in a station house as the upholders of the law eye him balefully. Like Frank Serpico, another honest cop of the period, Richie becomes a pariah, and so obsessed with his job that no one can live with him. His wife takes their son and leaves.

Russell Crowe is thick-shouldered and a little heavy in the gut; he gives Richie a quick stumpy walk, and he leans forward when he sits, as if he needed to be close to the ground in order to think. Denzel Washington stands upright, wears perfectly tailored suits, and smiles like the captain of a luxury liner entertaining royal guests. In style, Richie and Frank are as different as a badger and a hawk, but "American Gangster," which was produced by Brian Grazer, written by Steven Zaillian, and directed by Ridley Scott, presents them as equals. They are both ambitious, punctilious, violent men. When they finally meet, they regard each other as spiritual brothers. "American Gangster," which is based on Mark Jacobson's New York profile of Lucas from 2000 (with some parts fictionalized), is a febrile cops-and-robbers picture that has been scaled as an epic. Set in the years 1968 to 1975, it encompasses the rise of black entrepreneurial capitalism in its criminal version, the corruption of law enforcement, and the shadowy crossover between the two. In passing, the filmmakers suggest that America's heroin epidemic in those years grew out of the disintegration of Army morale during the Vietnam War, when thousands of G.I.s got hooked. Scott fills the screen with scenes of Americans shooting up in Bangkok and Harlem, getting rich on crime, and having a terrific time. It's as if the country were transfixed by war, drugs, and violence, with no one but the dour, troubled Nixon as an authority figure. The references to film classics of the period acknowledge the way the crime wave, and the resistance to it, was mythologized even as it was happening. The movie is a descendant not just of "The French Connection" but of the raucous blaxploitation romps of the early seventies. It's "Super Fly"—which also had a drug-dealer hero—without the cartoon cruddiness and the put-on violence and with an enormous increase of range and detail: How is the drug business actually done? How do mules get the stuff from one place to another?
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The pace of the movie is rapid, almost hectic, the touch glancing. Until the confrontation between Frank and Richie at the end, nothing stays on the screen for long, although Scott, working in the street, or in clubs and at parties, packs as much as he can into the corners of shots, and shapes even the most casual scenes decisively. "American Gangster" has been made with great panache and drive. And it pushes us hard—it asks us to accept the audacity of Frank's methods as not only brave but wittily inventive. Flying to Bangkok in 1968, Frank, against all advice, makes his way through the jungle to northern Thailand, where a courtly Chinese officer—a member of the long-defeated Kuomintang—supervises vast poppy fields. The officer, who may never have seen a black American before, has trouble believing that Frank is capable of taking a hundred or more kilos of uncut heroin into the United States without sponsorship (that is, without the Mafia). But the dope, in pure form, arrives in New York (in spectacularly bizarre fashion), gets cut by naked female "table workers" in Harlem, and is sold on the street at twice the strength and half the price of what the Mafia is selling. Frank has achieved the retailer's dream: he has eliminated the middleman and the competition in a single blow.

Later, he summons his five brothers from North Carolina and sets them up in dry-cleaning and auto-repair shops that serve as distribution points; he also buys his elderly mother (Ruby Dee) a huge white-columned house in New Jersey, where she presides at jubilant family dinners. Like many modern gangsters, Frank wants to turn crime into a rational enterprise; he wants to lead an orderly and loving family life, and to play his game so stealthily that he will never be tainted by what he does. And the audience may go along with his self-conception, which also appears to be the moviemakers' conception—that Frank is a cool guy, always shrewd enough to put a coaster under the drinks and leave no marks behind. Denzel Washington's movie-star glow is all-powerful here. Grinning broadly between fits of rage, his Frank Lucas is quicker, smarter, and more charming than anyone else around. He takes the overt menace out of such lines as "I'm a busy man, I got no time to be going to anyone's funeral." He makes it seem less a threat of murder (which it is) than a casual joke.

Pojavila se odlicna kopija na dva diska...

Taj Ridli Skot je one hit wonder. Dobro, two hits wonder.

Quote from: "Harvester"Taj Ridli Skot je one hit wonder. Dobro, two hits wonder.

a sada je postao i two-disc wonder!

imam taj film na dvdu već nedelju dana, ali me u gledanju sprečavaju 1) premalo vremena za to + 2) predugi running time od skoro 3 sata, + 3) inherentna frigidnost prema toj vrsti materijala (hej, ja sam jedini čovek koga znam koji ostaje mrtav ladan na sve te kumove, goodfellase, tonije montane, male cezare, drž. neprijatelje br. 1, i jedino neku kao mlaku ljubav gajim prema dilindžeru)

mene je film podosta razocarao.
Jos jedan od filmova sa dosta sminke i magle, a bez pravog mesa.

Ali evo, film jebe kevu na blagajnama; prvi dan i 15 milionceta, sto znaci sigurno vise od 40 mila za prvi vikend.   Zajebao je i Departed i Inside Mana, cak i Casino Royal.
Na RT je oko 80%.

Quote from: Ghoul

Quote from: "Harvester"(hej, ja sam jedini čovek koga znam koji ostaje mrtav ladan na sve te kumove, goodfellase, tonije montane, male cezare, drž. neprijatelje br. 1, i jedino neku kao mlaku ljubav gajim prema dilindžeru)

Nisi jedini

Čekaj, milane, zar nisi režirao INSAJDER?

Quote from: "crippled_avenger"Čekaj, milane, zar nisi režirao INSAJDER?

Ne, nikada

Quote from: "Ghoul"(hej, ja sam jedini čovek koga znam koji ostaje mrtav ladan na sve te kumove, goodfellase, tonije montane, male cezare, drž. neprijatelje br. 1, i jedino neku kao mlaku ljubav gajim prema dilindžeru)

Grisomova banda?

Quote from: "angel011"

Quote from: "Ghoul"(hej, ja sam jedini čovek koga znam koji ostaje mrtav ladan na sve te kumove, goodfellase, tonije montane, male cezare, drž. neprijatelje br. 1, i jedino neku kao mlaku ljubav gajim prema dilindžeru)

Grisomova banda?

mislim da je jasno o kojoj vrsti filma govorim, dakle ne o svim živim krimićima i gangsterajima, nego pre svega o onima sa jednim larger than life (uber cool) kriminalcem, the rise & fall of a criminal, ta vrsta stvari.

o GRISOMU sam već pevao panegirike na nekom topiku, i moja ljubav prema tom filmu nikako nema veze sa vrstom filmova o kojima se ovde govori.

a LEGS DIAMONDa jel volis?

Pogledao sam AMERICAN GANGSTER Ridleya Scotta.

Sigurno će se o ovom filmu pričati u danima koji dolaze, međutim, nema tu šta puno da se kaže. Reč je o jednom kompetentnom, mada suštinski neopredeljenom, polu-realističnom, polu-našminkanom pogledu na sukobe u podzemlju sedamdesetih, sa genijalnom pričom koja nije iskorišćeni ni 30% od svog potencijala, sa jako dobrim filmom sakrivenim negde unutar krajnje sterilnog tkiva koje je Scott izgradio.

Film je vrlo pitom čak i za Ridleyeve mejnstrim standarde, i samim tim ne uspeva da obuhvati zaista neverovatnu priču Frank Lucasa, nekadašnjeg šofera i telohranitelja Bumpy Johnsona koji je preuzeo njojoršku heroinsku mafiju, prevazišao Bumpyja tako što je sam postao vlasnik kartela, i prodavao duplo kvalitetniju robu za upola cene. To je zaista materija za Oliver Stonea a ne za Ridlyea i zailliana koji najviše vremena troše pokušavajući da meandriraju između Scorsesea, De Palme i Manna, a ne dostižu nijednog.

Međutim, negde mi je jasan uspeh ovog filma. On u sebi ima žanrovsku ambivalentnost starinskog storytellinga, Ridley pokušava da ispriča istinitu priču o jednom čoveku i to očigledno ume da upali na blagajnama.

AMERICAN GANGSTER u krajnjem dometu nije ništa više do Ridleyev DEPARTED.