Gang bang

Director Ridley Scott’s American Gangster leaves us with the distinct impression that the most interesting parts of the story aren’t in the movie. Reading Mark Jacobson’s New York Magazine article “The Return of Superfly,” on which Steven Zaillian’s script is based, confirms the impression.

The article deals with Frank Lucas, one time kingpin of the Harlem heroin trade, entrepreneur of the super-pure Blue Magic strain in the 1970s, imported directly from Southeast Asia through Lucas’ connections among U.S. forces in Vietnam. Jacobson sketches in Lucas’ background as a hustling bumpkin from North Carolina, hitting Harlem on the run in the 1940s and on his way to an early grave—after pissing off some very bad people—when he came under the wing of Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, the revered Godfather of Harlem. Lucas became Johnson’s driver, and stepped in to dominate the heroin trade when Johnson dropped dead of a heart attack in 1968. Quoting extensively in Lucas’ distinctive voice, Jacobson recounts the man’s adventures in Thailand, Burma and Laos nailing down his supply routes.

Arrested in 1975 on a raft of charges and sentenced to decades behind bars, Lucas was able to get his sentence reduced by more than half. How? Jacobson steps gingerly around the question, at the insistence of Lucas himself.

Jacobson paints a riveting portrait of Lucas, equal parts raffish street charm and cold-blooded menace. In Scott and Zaillian’s movie Lucas’ gnarls and knots are smoothed out into the suave narcissism of Denzel Washington. Missing—or barely hinted at—are Lucas’ backwoods roots and his exploits in Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle, while his cooperation with authorities after being arrested is dismissed with a few written titles at the very end. This last touch also minimizes Washington’s on-screen time with his putative co-star Russell Crowe (as investigator Richie Roberts, the movie’s apparently fictional composite of the forces that brought Lucas down). Keeping your two top stars on parallel tracks and giving them only one scene together (like Pacino and De Niro in Heat) is a dicey business; if you don’t watch out, it can look like a bit of a cheat.

American Gangster concentrates on all the familiar elements of the urban crime melodrama: the street hustling backed by the vintage R&B soundtrack, the cops in their warehouse headquarters, the bulletin boards studded with surveillance photos, the kingpin in his sable coat hobnobbing with Mafia dons and celebrities, and finally the raids on drug labs, safe houses and mansions.

It may sound strange to knock American Gangster for trotting out these standard trappings so soon after praising We Own the Night for much the same thing. But We Own the Night energized and revitalized its clichés, while American Gangster resorts to them. And James Gray was in command of his material from the first shot; surprisingly, Scott and Zaillian are not.

Director Scott spends most of his first half-hour getting a grip on his narrative; it’s an oddly uncertain approach for one of Hollywood’s most confident and firm-handed directors, and a bad way to set out on a picture that’s going to run to a hefty 157 minutes. Scott’s hand becomes stronger as the film gets more standard and conventional; it’s as if the director’s comfort level is tied to how many times we’ve seen these things before.

Once we ignore that nagging sense that American Gangster is sidestepping the best parts of the story—what Lucas was up to before coming to Harlem, how he fared in Asia, what kind of deal he cut once the law closed in—the movie has plenty of pleasures. Washington and Crowe are always worth watching, even when they’re reporting to the set on completely different days. And Scott has a deep bench in his supporting cast—Chiwetel Ejiofor, Josh Brolin, Ted Levine, Cuba Gooding Jr., Idris Elba, Ruby Dee, Armand Assante, Clarence Williams III, Kevin Corrigan.

Nothing to sneeze at, to be sure. But such a pedigreed field of actors, coupled with Scott and Zaillian behind the camera, promises an epic experience that American Gangster doesn’t quite deliver.