American Gangster (2007)

A grim portrait of ambition and greed, largely told differently than other gangster stories but retaining a conventional arc. Ridley Scott tells this story in familiar fashion and employs every great actor he can find to flush out his material. And there are incredible scenes with great actors that haven't been in scenes before, perhaps reason enough to see this. A standoff in a diner between Denzel and Idris Alba comes to mind. But the final act of this film devolves into a morality tale that loses its legs even quicker the second title cards tell the passage of 15 years. If this movie is 2.5 hours - needlessly so - then why not take the extra five minutes to show us that passage, or better yet just trust the audience to get it?

Quick hits:

Russell Crowe never at any point is convincingly from New Jersey. Or even from North America.

Denzel/Alba, Denzel/Crowe are amazing scenes and Denzel is super cool

A lot of scenes we've already seen in other movies. So is this movie additive to the gangster genre? This story has been told through fictional characters - a la King of New York or New Jack City - but this has the gravity of being "Based on a True Story" which presumably adds legitimacy to the production. I personally think that letting Denzel cook in this context makes the movie worth making, but it does not seem to add anything to the cultural conversation in a way that, say, Goodfellas didn't already. 

Denzel is never taken seriously because of racist assumptions by the feds and police, which he employs to his advantage for years, only to be lame-ducked at end, a stupid and trivial approach to a long movie that they didn't know how to end. 

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