American Gangster

This movie is essential a black Goodfellas if the foul-mouthed cops who busted Ray Liotta at the end were in half the movie instead of one scene. And if it were directed by middlebrow grinder Ridley Scott instead of cinematic genius Martin Scorsese. Other than that, the two films share a lot of characteristics. They both glory in horrible seventies fashions and the glamor and sudden violence of the gangster lifestlye. More substantatively, both films underscore the connection between the cuthroat world of organized crime and good old American capitalism. Both films are also about two and a half hours long. One of the bigger differences is that only American Gangster actually feels like it's two and a half hours long. I never complain about movie lengths, but man does the middle of this fucker DRAG. The movie never really builds any kind of momentum. Still, there are few things cooler in film than when Denzel Washington plays a bad guy, and there are some really nice bits here and there, but it just doesn't add up to much beyond a well crafted gangster film that bites off a bit more than it can chew. It's too bad, because American Gangster is clearly aiming for epic sweep: it's an attempt to encapsulate the urban decay and endemic political and social corruption of the Vietnam war era, but the techiniques used are clumsy and ineffectual. The most egregious of these is the repeated use of one of the worst tropes in the filmic canon: the Amazing Expository Televison! Instead of weaving the political realities of the late sixties and early seventies into the film and its characters, whenever Scott wants to give a shot of poltical context, he shows his characters watching television, which is always convienently tuned to a news report on the situation in Vietnam, the urban drug epidemic, etc.

Score: 7.7