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>> American Gangster is a disappointing
adaptation of a fascinating story

by MARK SLUTSKY

Writer Mark Jacobson caught up with Frank Lucas in 2000, for a feature story in New York magazine called “The Return of the Superfly.” At one point, in the ’70s, Lucas had been the gangster king of Harlem, selling millions of dollars worth of “Blue Magic” heroin. He comes across as a fascinatingly shaded character in the article, charming and threatening and still possessed of an intricate intelligence, revealed as he gives a guided tour of his old neighbourhood.

You should read the article (it’s still online at www.nymag.com)—it’s full of amazing period detail and stories of that particularly violent, vivid era. It seems like it would make a great movie, and in the hands of Ridley Scott, and starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, it should be.

But American Gangster isn’t; it’s a huge disappointment, more of an extended equivocation than an epic film. It tells Frank Lucas’s story, but it somehow leaves out all the good stuff. For a gangster movie, it’s strangely modest, both in the parts of the story it chooses to show and in the way it presents them—for once, you could call Scott’s style restrained.

Washington plays Lucas, who was once driver to Harlem mob legend and folk hero “Bumpy” Johnson. The film opens with his death, after which Lucas contrives to set up his own operation; we know he’s serious when he shoots a rival in broad daylight and then goes back to the café where he’s having lunch to finish eating.

Bringing his brothers up to New York from North Carolina, he quickly establishes his enterprise as a family operation, and keeps a low profile by avoiding the flashy clothes and lifestyle of the other Harlem kingpins. At the same time, pathologically honest cop Richie Roberts (Crowe) is assigned to head an elite drug task force, with the idea that his group of officers will be insulated from the rest of the rampantly corrupt NYPD, and they’re soon on Lucas’s trail.

What could be a great procedural thriller is instead a strangely plodding sequence of events set against a beautifully realized ’70s backdrop (Harlem looks amazing, though as a friend pointed out, the ’80s-era graffiti doesn’t fit). The problem with American Gangster is it’s never exciting, never giving you the payoff you want in a movie like this. Even Lucas’s ghastly method of heroin trafficking—he stuffed it in the coffins of dead soldiers returning from Vietnam—is played down. You don’t find out about it until the end of the movie, and Scott even denies you a shot of the stuff in the boxes.

There’s a lot, in fact, that this movie promises and never delivers. In separate scenes, we’re introduced to the colourful members of both groups—Washington’s and Crowe’s—and there’s some expectation that these supporting characters will bring something to the story, but they all remain fairly anonymous to the end. The movie gives a sort of vague overview of the heroin-dealing business, but it stubbornly resists the sort of specificity and detail that make a film like Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas so fascinating.

And then there’s Lucas himself. It’s a shame how little of his personality makes it to the screen—the character in Jacobson’s story is so fascinating, and here, as Denzel plays him (or how he’s written), he’s a cipher, neither sinister nor sympathetic, not nearly as interesting as he should be—much like American Gangster itself.

American Gangster opens
this Friday, Nov. 2

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