The Prague Post
November 22nd, 2008
Endowment Fund     Business Listings ONLINE      Reservations      Classifieds    Subscriptions
Hotel Prague Centre

Home » Archives » Night & Day

Hooked on war

Gritty and cynical, Ridley Scott's film is long
Cinema Review | Search restaurants | Archives

By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
January 3rd, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
"Cash and carry" justice. Russell Crowe is the good cop in Ridley Scott's new film.
enlarge
American Gangster

Directed by Ridley Scott
With Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Josh Brolin and Ruby Dee

The perfect monument to war, at least in the realm of poetic justice, is surely the Imperial War Museum in London, which, as Ian McEwan reminds readers in his novel Atonement (coming to the screen near you soon), is housed within the former chapel of the world’s most famous madhouse, Bedlam.
War’s bounty (often personified by those grim four horsemen) is an inexhaustable cornucopia indeed, but we sometimes miss smaller treats in the carnage, like drug trafficking.
There were, of course, the Opium Wars between the English and Chinese (not commemorated at the Imperial War Museum), which insured that the United Kingdom’s addicts would never suffer rationing or be forced to wait in long lines. But closer to our own time, during the Reagan daze, there was a nice trade in cocaine and arms between the Land of the Free and the Contra guerrilla band in Nicaragua.
Vietnam also served as an important conduit for drugs into America during that successful war, aiding the establishment of many healthy business relationships between Asian drug lords and various hometown mafia, often with the U.S. Army, wittingly or not, playing middleman.
Ridley Scott’s new film, American Gangster, is a heavily fictionalized account of a true story, where an honest Fed tries to break down the Asian supply line by targeting a criminal syndicate, the U.S. Army, and the crooked cops of the NYPD, who not only facilitated the trade but actually profited handsomely from it.
American Gangster is the latest film to tap into the gritty urban cop operas from the 1970s such as The Seven-Ups and The French Connection, which Ridley’s film knowingly references. Like Inside Man, 16 Blocks, Lucky Number Slevin and the forthcoming We Own the Night, American Gangster’s mean streets form the grid of Manhattan.
The film tracks two stories simultaneously, stories that will not mesh until the final 20 minutes. First, there’s the rise of Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) as the head of Harlem’s heroin racket. In reality, Lucas was the acolyte of the famous Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson (a good cameo performance by Clarence Williams III), a Harlem Renaissance poet/crime boss. After Bumpy dies, Lucas takes up his empire.
The second story is of Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), a hard-living moralist cramming for the bar, while battling against police corruption. After accepting the job as a federal agent in the narcotics bureau, Roberts strives to end the flow of pure heroin into New York, which inevitably leads to Lucas.
Lucas, who found a way to use the Vietnam War as his supplier, is continually on his guard against rival gang heads in New York, the local cops on the take, and the sincere guardians of the law. Roberts is often fighting against the same groups, and this commonality will finally see the Harlem thug and the good guy join forces.
For all of its intricate plotting and good performances (including work from Josh Brolin, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Ruby Dee), and Ridley’s faithfulness to both the taste and tenor of the times, American Gangster is far too long and fails to generate the energy found in the films that inspired it.
Obviously, Scott and his favorite leading actor, Crowe, are in better form here than in last year’s surprisingly inept A Good Year, but then they could only go up from that project. Washington, cooly donning villain togs, puts in one of his best performances since Inside Man. He also gets most of the best lines, particularly when philosophizing about the drug trade.
In Arthur Miller’s autobiography, Timebends, the playwright wrote about the need that the NYPD had for keeping young juvenile delinquents in the Lower East Side delinquent. It gave the cops a chance, Miller said, “to play cowboys and Indians” with the kids. In a much larger context, the same role playing assures that that other fruitless war — the one on drugs —remains such a long running hit.
As Lucas tells Roberts, “Judges, lawyers, cops, politicians stop bringing dope into this country, about 100,000 people are gonna be out of a job.”
It’s such bracing cynicism that gives American Gangster its rare moments of power, and also offers a succinct answer to the question of why the poppy harvests in Afghanistan and Iraq are suddenly so fruitful and profitable.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (3/01/2008):

Browse the Current Issue

If you enjoyed this article, why don't you subscribe to the print version!
We accept secure online transactions provided by PayPal and Moneybookers

Be the first to add a comment!


Full Name: *
City: *
E-mail: **
This comment can be published in the print version of The Prague Post
Enter the text on the right:
 visual captcha
Comment: *
* Required field. In order to be approved for display, comments must have a first and last name and a city.
** E-mails are required and will only be used for internal purposes.

Most visited in Business Listings

Provokator
Hotel booking
The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in
The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic.
To subscribe to the print paper, click here.
Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.