As the man who turned the two-bit drug-dealing operations of Harlem into an organized, ruthless business in the '60s and '70s, smuggling heroin from Southeast Asia in the coffins of dead American soldiers, Frank Lucas is the kind of real-life figure someone should have made a movie about a long time ago. Indeed, various players in the Lucas saga — other drug dealers, cops on the take, etc. — have featured prominently in films like Shaft and Prince of the City. So it's natural to get excited about this epic look at Lucas's life, directed by Ridley Scott and written by Steven Zaillian, with Denzel Washington as Lucas and Russell Crowe as the dogged detective who sought to bring him down. There's just too much talent and compelling material here for anything to go seriously wrong.
Nothing does: American Gangster moves well, its acting is solid, the direction elegant. But it turns out there's a drawback to making a movie about a subject who seems to have walked straight out of a movie, a kind of odd, off-putting familiarity that renders much of it lifeless. Crooked cops, ruthless kingpins, devoted cops with marital difficulties, montages galore. No doubt the filmmakers believe that because Lucas is a historical archetype, some of these cliches can be forgiven. All I know is that whenever Denzel Washington went back to his calm-gangster's-hair-trigger-temper-suddenly-explodes repertoire, I found myself rolling my eyes.
It's not just that other movies and TV shows have been here. It's that they've done it better. To anyone who's sat through even half an episode of The Wire, American Gangster will feel like a cartoon. A scene where Lucas chastises an associate for spending too profligately and attracting attention hearkens back to a better scene in Goodfellas where Robert De Niro does the same. You get the picture. Familiarity need not be a bad thing; Quentin Tarantino has turned obsessive referentiality into his own art form. But here the familiarity here never leads to anything fresh. (Speaking of Tarantino, Scott really asks for it when he scores a montage to Bobby Womack's "Across 110th Street," repurposed more gracefully in Jackie Brown.) If a disposable gangster epic that goes through all the same moves is what you're looking for, then enjoy. But forgive those of us who, seeing the talent involved here, expected something more. — Bilge Ebiri