Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta...

I was trying to remember a movie Denzel Washington starred in that I didn't like. Considering his resume, that's kind of a hard task. Same goes for Russell Crowe. Both are well known to be two of the more consistently good actors in the business. So it came as a surprise when the film that I disliked for each of them happened to be the one they both starred in--Virtuosity. A lot changes in 12 years, though, and mediocre films like that tend to get buried when you cover it up with a pile of quality movies like these two guys have. Would a reprisal of this team-up yield the same results? With Ridley Scott directing them, of course not. Still, it wasn't as great as I thought it could be.

American Gangster tells the story of Frank Lucas, a driver and right-hand man to a powerful crime boss in Harlem. When his boss suddenly dies, Lucas finds an opportunity to make a name for himself by using good ol' American entrepreneurship to sell a quality product at a competitive price by cutting out the middle man. With discipline and smarts, he finds himself at the top of the New York heroin trade while cleverly alluding the law. Meanwhile, Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), a by-the-book New Jersey police detective, is put in charge of a task force to bring down the drug trade which eventually puts him in an intersecting path to Lucas.

It's no surprise that Washington and Crowe give strong acting performances. At this point, I wouldn't be shocked if this was just second nature to them. Ridley Scott puts together a solid film, visually on par with any of his great work, and engrossing from start to finish. Unfortunately, all of that put together was just good. Going into the theater, I was expecting something on the scale of The Godfather. Instead, this was just an entertaining movie that I'll probably forget by next year. The problem, perhaps, was trying to make this a great film. Movies that focus on both sides of the law tend to show the similarities that both good and evil men inherently share. We're all capable of good deeds and terrible deeds, but it's the choices we make in life that define who we are. In the case of Lucas, his evil is depicted in his ruthless actions to prove himself to other mobsters trying to move in on his territory, going so far as to shoot a crime lord in the head in broad daylight on a crowded Harlem sidewalk. The inherent badness of his profession and the endless lives that the drug trade is destroying almost seems to be lost on him as he enjoys the spoils of his riches. At the same time, he remembers to take care of his mother and family, and tries to help out some of the poor in his neighborhood. Richie Roberts, too, has his duality. Rather than keeping a stash of unmarked cash for himself that no one will notice is gone, he turns it in at the scorn of the rest of the police division. However, his home life is a wreck with his womanizing ways and the neglect of his son.

Michael Mann's Heat was perhaps one of the better films to capture this and move a film into a true climactic satisfying clash between it's two leads, Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. A lot was said about these two greats finally meeting up in the same scene together for the first time in both of their illustrious careers. The buildup to the sit-down between them in a generic coffee shop and their eventual showdown along the runways of LAX seemed to truly capture two men on opposite sides of the law that were really the same in many ways. The Earth didn't shake and lightning didn't strike when Pacino and DeNiro were finally on-screen together, but it was a truly memorable moment in its own way. I think American Gangster was trying to achieve the same thing, but the final intersection between Washington and Crowe was completely anticlimactic, and almost made me wish they had scrapped most of the Richie Roberts story, even despite Crowe's great acting work. The real meat of this film is the rise and fall of Frank Lucas, and Scott should have focused on that 100%.

Still, I enjoyed watching this movie. It just had the potential to be so much more, I think. Don't expect it to garner too many nominations come awards season.