American Gangsters, 10/29.

Before getting into American Gangster, opening this week, and perhaps catching up with a few stray reviews of Mr Untouchable, which opened last week, you've got to see this: "During the Harlem heroin plague of the seventies, few dealers were bigger than Frank Lucas and Leroy 'Nicky' Barnes," begins Mark Jacobson in New York:

When the possibility emerged that these two old-school street rivals might be willing to engage in what could only be called a historic conversation - they haven't spoken in 30 years - it was easy to envision yelling, phone slamming, and maybe even a death threat or two. Lucas, as I knew well (from writing in this magazine the original piece upon which American Gangster is based), could go off at any moment. And Barnes, who likes to quote Moby Dick and King Lear, mocks Lucas's "country boy" lack of education and perceived lack of finesse in Mr Untouchable. When it came down to it, however, the two old drug-kingpins-in-winter revealed a familiarity that bordered on a kind of love. Or at least respect for a fellow tycoon.

Updated through 11/4.

Alright then, to the movies: American Gangster "unfolds in the 60s and 70s in a New York plagued by drug abuse and police corruption, by the trickle-down effects of the Vietnam War, Nixon, racism, and, implicitly, the internal contradictions of capitalism," writes New York's David Edelstein. "But for all the sprawl, American Gangster feels secondhand. It's like Scarface drained of blood, at arm's length from the culture that spawned it."

"Our loyalties are split between the hero of virtue and the hero of vice," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "We don't have to choose, which is fine—irresponsibility is one of the pleasures of narrative movies. But can we accept the movie's glorification of Frank Lucas in the terms in which it's offered?... Frank's ascent is presented simply—not with irony, or as a mini-tragedy, or as a cruel joke on his own community, but as a long-delayed victory of black capitalism."

"Not only is American Gangster dumb as a rock, but it's also far too convinced of its import to be any fun," growls Nick Schager in Slant. "There may be no other prestige pic this year as mistakenly convinced of its own weightiness, with its title and subsequent scenes featuring Frank positing himself as the embodiment of can-do Yankee spirit ('My country!,' 'This is America!') failing to elevate the tale to the realm of the symbolic, but succeeding in giving this already klutzy, derivative gangster saga an added measure of pomposity."

Josh Rottenberg talks with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. Also in Entertainment Weekly: Simon Vozick-Levinson tells the story of the making of Jay-Z's American Gangster, "a new CD embracing the very theme he built his reputation on: the risks and rewards of slinging drugs, familiar to a rapper who long ago spent his days dodging cops on the streets of Brooklyn.... It's not the film's soundtrack; Jay played no part in the entirely separate set of Vietnam-era hits that fits that bill. Instead, Jay's Gangster tale follows a striking, dramatic arc of its own, transporting listeners from a young hustler's ambition ('Pray,' 'No Hook') to a kingpin's arrogance ('Roc Boys,' 'Ignorant S---') to a career criminal's inevitable ruin ('Fallin'')."

Susan King offers "a look at some seminal gangster films, as well as some unusual twists on the traditional mob story."

Also in the Los Angeles Times: "With roles in two of winter's most eagerly anticipated films - a small part as an evil narc in Ridley Scott's drug dealer epic American Gangster, which reaches theaters Friday, and a breakout performance in the Coen brothers' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men, out Nov 9 - [Josh] Brolin is poised to convince audiences and A-list directors alike that his sudden multiplex ubiquity is no fluke," writes Chris Lee.

Earlier: "American Gangsters, 10/21."

Updates, 10/30: "At the American Film Market, which begins here on Wednesday, no fewer than three prospective movies about the [Medellín] cocaine cartel and its kingpin, Pablo Escobar, are expected to vie for attention," reports Michael Cieply in the New York Times. "Escobar was killed in a 1993 shoot-out with the law in Colombia. For nearly 14 years, his story kicked around the film world, inspiring the Entourage plot line about a movie that can't quite be made. But suddenly, and for no obvious reason, the real-life drug tale has inspired a cinematic battle, pitting players like Oliver Stone and Joe Carnahan against one another."

"American Gangster doesn't add anything new to the dialogue between the cop and criminal archetypes," writes Matt Singer. "It's not as pensive as Heat, not as dynamic as Hard Boiled, not as sardonic as The Departed." Also at IFC News, Singer and Alison Willmore discuss Scott's director's cuts.

"Ridley Scott - Overrated?" asks Noah Forrest at Movie City News.

Ryan Stewart's got a junket report at Cinematical.

"American Gangster is a movie with obvious gravitas and a familiar argument: Organized crime is outsider capitalism," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Still, for all of American Gangster's discreet period markers and cleverly cobbled-together locations, it doesn't get the period's putrid exhilaration - the sense of irreversible decay and giddy disorder.... Albeit directed with high-powered panache, American Gangster lacks The French Connection's messy human drama and, a choreographed final bust notwithstanding, thrill-machine set pieces. The movie never spins out of control."

Updates, 10/31: "The charisma projected by both Mr Washington and Mr Crowe makes American Gangster the most felicitously magnetic dual vehicle of the year," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "It is also perhaps the most damning account ever of the longest and most disastrous war in our history, the 80-year war on drugs, which has jailed so many of our citizens while, in effect, enriching the criminal gangs around the world and multiplying the menaces of addiction."

"The whole thing is derivative, by the numbers and shamelessly entertaining," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. "Just between you and me, [Crowe's] is the awesomest Al Pacino performance I've seen in years. Crowe acts exactly the way all my friends and I do whenever we get drunk and watch Heat for the 4,000th time, and I desperately love him for it."

"American Gangster is quite a high-caliber affair, with a star-studded cast (including several hip-hop artists) and close attention to period details — but it's overlong, a little too morally precise, and spends too much time on Crowe's character, who is hardly as interesting as Washington's smooth, sinister schemer," writes Cheryl Eddy in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Updates, 11/2: ST VanAirsdale talks with Scott and Mr Untouchable co-producer Damon Dash about the "real Harlem" at the Reeler, where R Emmet Sweeney writes, "American Gangster has the feel of a once-cherished idea that lost momentum with every script rewrite and director change," writes at the Reeler.

"It's hard not to fall for these men pumping like pistons across the screen, which is as much part of the movie's allure as its problem," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Mr Scott doesn't escape the contradiction that bedevils almost every Hollywood movie about gangsters, which cry shame, shame, as they parade their stars, crank the soul and showcase the foxy ladies, the swank digs and rides."

"American Gangster offers only the stingiest platform for its actors, and as a piece of storytelling - built on the foundation of a great story - it's an epic that's been sliced and diced into so many little morsels that almost nothing in it has any weight," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "The script... is by Steven Zaillian, writer of Schindler's List and Gangs of New York, and, more recently, the director of the deadly, prestige-bloated All the King's Men. Zaillian's credit is supposedly one of the movie's big selling points, but the picture comes together as an abstract clutch of scenes rather than a fluid whole, or even a jagged one. Its serrated, corroded edge never cuts clean."

"It takes nerve to call a film American Gangster: It's more than a movie title, it's the name of a venerable genre that dates to cinema's beginning," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "But once you see this finely made and richly satisfying film, you understand it's the only title possible."

"If you think the title American Gangster sounds generic, wait until you see the movie," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC. "A shopworn compendium of charismatic crooks, scruffy cops, corruption, temptation and absolution, the film makes one regret that Denzel Washington already made a movie called Déjà Vu, since that's what he's trafficking in here."

"Not since Spike Lee's Malcolm X has there been such an over-scaled, all-star, studio-financed film set in black America - and Scott's impetus is as questionable as Lee's," argues Armond White in the New York Press. "Being a Ridley Scott film, American Gangster is no more a critique of social history or political behavior than 1492 or Gladiator. It's basically a big-budget glorification of ambition as in the current documentary Mr Untouchable, director Marc Levin's latest white-negro obsession."

"Director Ridley Scott is going for 70s grime and sprawling 70s pacing, but Washington comes across as a slumming 90s film protagonist, a New Jack City star enduring the cast of Serpico with barely contained contempt," writes Tasha Robinson at the AV Club.

"There's just too much talent and compelling material here for anything to go seriously wrong," writes Bilge Ebiri for Nerve. "Nothing does: American Gangster moves well, its acting is solid, the direction elegant. But it turns out there's a drawback to making a movie about a subject who seems to have walked straight out of a movie, a kind of odd, off-putting familiarity that renders much of it lifeless."

"In the final analysis, it's just another mega-budget Hollywood movie that repackages familiar genre moves with A-level stars for a result that proves dismayingly hackneyed and poorly imagined," writes Geoffrey Cheshire in the Independent. "Of course it will make boatloads of money. Indeed, that's the kind of gangster movie it is - one determined to make out like a bandit, no matter what else may be said of it."

"[T]he movie is never quite pop enough to get audiences hooting and hollering and quoting favorite lines, nor smart enough to inspire passionate post-movie debate," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "Scene by scene, the film is unassailably well-crafted.... But there's something oddly dull, even respectable, about Scott's adherence to the rules of gangster-film grammar."

Scott's "goal is epic, and he would gladly drag his feet to get there," writes Duncan Shepherd in the San Diego Reader. "At two and a half hours plus, he indeed does get there. Washington, to pay him a backhanded compliment, is never quite as credible as a through-and-through baddie, even though that seems to be the way to the Oscar (i.e., Training Day). Crowe on the other hand is a perfectly credible crusader, overcoming no greater obstacles on the road to respectability than his buoyant white sneakers and his unflattering, inexpensive period haircut, framing his face with folded wings."

"This is an engrossing story, told smoothly and well, and Russell Crowe's contribution is enormous," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times.

"As corny as this relationship may be, it returns again to the movie's central problem: It loves Frank but has to hate him, too," writes Cindy Fuchs in the Philadelphia City Paper.

Will Lawrence talks with Scott for the Telegraph.

"Our love affair with wealth and fame is now untrammeled by doubts," writes Richard Schickel, following a brief overview of American gangsters past in Time. "It is our big good thing, and eventually Crowe's character, like the rest of us, must surrender to its cheerful demands. That makes American Gangster, which is rather leisurely paced but richly detailed in the way it pursues the minutiae of conspicuous criminality as well as consumption, a more disturbing movie than its makers may have intended."

"[I]t can be classed as a respectable second-tier entry, our decade's equivalent of Michael Mann's Heat," writes the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle.

Update, 11/4: "The film's best scene... comes when the two confront each other one-on-one," writes Rob Humanick. "Its quality could be the result of the two actors finally being allowed to play off one another, or it could be the fact that it comes near the tail-end of this lifeless stretch of empty craftsmanship. Take your pick."

Posted by dwhudson at October 29, 2007 2:55 AM