When you hear the term American Gangster, you think of 1930s Chicago, with Baby Face Nelson and Al Capone running guns and liquor. But this American Gangster ain’t your granddad’s gangster; here, the setting is Harlem in the 1970s, and the main man is Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), a former wiseguy driver, of all things, a man who figures out that the best way to sell heroin to the willing naifs of the Big Apple is to go straight to the source. Business 101, lads.

Lucas’ typical tale of rising from modest origins to the top of the proverbial world dovetails with the fall and rise of one Richie ROberts (Russell Crowe), a cop who once (in)famously returned a million dollars in unmarked bills he found in the trunk of a car. The money had dirty cops written all over it, see, so now Roberts is a bit of a pariah within the NYPD. Enter a new presidential task force on narcotics, which apparently are overtaking the country.
Roberts and his crew need big busts (save your jokes) in order to justify their existence, and luckily enough they stumble upon a new brand of heroin called Blue Magic that is literally all over the streets of New York. And guess who’s responsible all that dope? Good job, you guessed Frank Lucas. Frank’s gotten it in his head that paying someone to buy it from someone in Southeast Asia – at the height of the Vietnam War, mind you – is just bad business, so he hops a plane, scopes out the area, makes a deal, and is home in time for supper. Oh, and he also manages to romance and marry a former Miss Puerto Rico. Helluva guy, that Frank Lucas.

Meanwhile, Roberts’ own life is in the crapper; his wife (Carla Gugino) is divorcing him and wants to take their young son to Las Vegas (!); he’s contesting the divorce because he doesn’t want to lose his kid. Plus, he drives a total POS car, can barely afford to dress himself, his fellow cops think he’s corrupt, and he gets no respect because he’s a Jersey cop. Jersey people in general get no respect, but the cops are lower on the totem pole than most.

If you remember the trailer for this movie, you might have the sense that Lucas and Roberts team up at some point, like a dynamic crime-fighting duo in which one of them is a murdering thug and the other’s a drug lord. I kid, I kid. Anyway, maybe that trailer was accurate, and maybe it was not. But regardless, the movie feels sort of predictable; you just know that at some point these separate tales of Good and Evil will intertwine. I mean, you just know it. There will be guns and booze, and someone will almost get kicked off the force, and someone will gun down a competitor drug lord, and in the end they’ll join hands and beat up everyone who stands in their way, or something.

The movie’s pretty predictable, is what I’m saying, and what’s more, it’s a long, long movie (more than two and a half hours). If it weren’t for powerful performances by Washington and especially Crowe, there would be almost nothing to this bloated, dull “gangster” carcass. Good period piece, though; the cars and fashions look as horrible as you might remember them looking. Always good to see wacky porkchop sideburns, too. Where’s Huggy Bear?

Side benefit: crotchety old Ruby Dee, as Frank’s mom. She’s onery! She’s cantankerous! She slaps Frank! About all of Mama Lucas’s scenes are contained in that trailer; Dee can’t be on screen for more than ten minutes, and yet she notched an Oscar nomination. She’s wonderful, definitely, but she’s barely in the movie.

**1/2